D.C.'s new mental hospital 'too small'
By: Michael Neibauer
Examiner Staff Writer
July 31, 2009
The District's new $157 million, 293-bed psychiatric hospital on the campus of St. Elizabeths will be too small to house its anticipated number of patients when the long-awaited facility opens in 2010, city officials said this week.
The dearth of space -- the hospital will be roughly 70 beds short -- was revealed as D.C. Councilman David Catania, chairman of the health committee, explained to his colleagues why the Department of Mental Health needs $2.32 million more for a project most thought was fully funded.
"The new hospital," Catania said Wednesday, "is too small."
The department is renovating an existing patient building on the St. E's campus for "overflow," Catania said. The rehabilitation project should be complete in time for the March opening of the "state-of-the-art" hospital.
St. Elizabeths Hospital "is prepared to meet the needs of District residents who require in-patient hospitalization during the course of their mental health recovery," DMH Director Stephen Baron said in a statement.
"Because the census at St. Elizabeths is now about 360 patients, we plan to continue to use one of the existing buildings when we move into the new facility next spring," Baron said. "The hospital population has dropped almost 15 percent since last October, and we expect it to continue to go down."
D.C. officials familiar with the hospital project tell The Examiner that those who designed the building some seven years ago assumed -- based on study data -- that more people would receive their mental health treatment in community hospitals like Providence or United Medical, rather than a state hospital where patients are often committed long-term.
Although patient numbers have dwindled, the process has been slow.
"Admissions are decreasing as we make more treatment beds available in community hospitals," Baron said. "Also, some patients based on their treatment are ready to live more independently with intensive community services."
At its peak in the 1940s, St. Elizabeths housed 7,000 patients on 300 acres. But the 154-year-old hospital has steadily deteriorated in recent decades. A 2006 investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice found that the hospital's infrastructure "is in a state of severe deterioration and serious dilapidation." The facility "fails to provide patients with a safe living environment," the report concluded.
