Landmark Medical Center in Woonsocket will relocate its mental health outpatient unit, Landmark Comprehensive Psychiatric Services, to new offices in Cumberland beginning Wednesday. Two part-time psychiatrists for adolescents and children have been let go in the move, according to Landmark Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Richard Charest, but he said the program will still provide a full range of psychiatric services for adults and children.
”It still affords the same level of access,” he said, adding that the psychiatrists laid off will continue to practice at Bradley Hospital in Providence and/or go into private practice.
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Charest said the hospital will also continue to offer its inpatient psychiatric unit, which only treats adults. None of its other outpatient psychiatric providers will be affected and the center will continue to employ two part-time pediatric psychologists, Charest said.
The restructuring decision came after Landmark evaluated all of its hospital owned physician practices and determined that psychiatry, child or otherwise, “is not our core business” – although the hospital did not want to “abandon” all is its mental health services, Charest said.
Although the revised outpatient program will still offer counseling services, on-site clinicians will not be able to prescribe medicine and will have to refer those cases to Bradley Hospital or private practice psychiatrists in the area.
The new site for Landmark Comprehensive Services is approximately four to five miles from the hospital, at the Monastery on Diamond Hill Road in Cumberland. Charest said the outpatient center will continue to offer two full-time psychiatrists, one full-time psychologist and one part-time psychologist for adults, two full-time psychologists for pediatrics and adolescents, and one part-time psychologist for adolescents only.
One of the child psychiatrists being relocated from Landmark is Jeffrey Hunt, M.D., director of adolescent programs at Bradley Hospital and a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the Brown University School of Medicine.
Although Landmark officials say the layoffs were not a cost-savings move, Dr. Hunt said the lack of adequate payment for psychiatric services from insurers and increased administrative costs “killed Landmark’s [psychiatric] practice in the last year.”
Aside from the Northern Rhode Island Community Services mental health center, which employs 1.4 child and adolescent psychiatrists, the northern part of the state now “has no child psychiatrist,” Dr. Hunt said.
Those seeking services will now have to travel to Providence, “where there’s a wait,” said Bridget Bennett-Lewis, vice president for children’s mental health services at NRI Community Services. And because the chronic lack of childhood psychiatrist services in Rhode Island has now reached “catastrophic proportions,” to lose any child psychiatrist services “will have a significant impact” on the remaining providers in the area.
The center’s catchment area includes Cumber-land, Lincoln, North Smithfield, Burrillville and Woonsocket, which is one of the state’s core cities along with Newport and Providence that has the highest indicators for at-risk children, including high rates for poverty, teenage pregnancy and high school dropouts.
The population of children in the area according to Rhode Island Kids Count is approximately 26,300.
NRI Community Services currently treats provides intense psychiatric services to about 140 children and adolescents, about 60 percent of those on medication, and treats another 30 children on an outpatient capacity, Bennett-Lewis said.
And the kids just keep on coming, with the center averaging 15 intakes or new patient requests every week. “That doesn’t end,” Bennett-Lewis said. “That’s like a door that just doesn’t close.”
