Rally decries hospital plan to move services out of Ulster
KINGSTON, N.Y. » Elected officials joined health care workers and community activists Tuesday to decry a plan by Westchester Medical Center Health Network to permanently move inpatient mental health and detox programs out of its Mary’s Avenue campus.
Roughly two dozen people turned out for the rally, which was held on the lawn of City Hall
and in the shadow of the HealthAlliance of the Hudson Valley’s Broadway campus
Westchester Medical Center, the parent company of HealthAlliance of the Hudson Valley, has said it will seek state approval to move inpatient mental health and detox services out of Kingston permanently to its MidHudson Regional Hospital in Poughkeepsie. The services were moved from the Mary’s Avenue campus to Kingston in March so it could be converted to a coronavirus surge hospital. However, the need for that never materialized.
“We don’t want a compromise of these services, we don’t want a shadow of these services, we want a
restoration of these services fully to serve our community, to serve our families,” state Assemblyman Kevin Cahill, D-Kingston, said during the rally.
Kingston Alderwoman Michele Hirsch, D-Ward 9, who. is a family peer advocate and assistant program director of adolescent services at Family of Woodstock, said that since the move, psychiatric patients have been forced to remain in the Broadway campus emergency room for days awaiting a bed, and that children and adult patients are kept in the same area.
Other advocates echoed Hirsch’s concern about the conditions mental health patients have endured since the move, including being sent to inpatient facilities as far away as Westchester County and Albany.
Cahill, D-Kingston, said he and other state officials
have tried repeatedly to get the agency to commit to returning as soon as possible those services, which he said were part of the original merger agreement between Kingston Hospital and Benedictine Hospital and are required under the certificate of need under which the facility operates.
“Ladies and gentlemen, they refused to make that commitment,” Cahill said, calling WMC Network “an unresponsive health care vendor.”
Ulster County Executive Pat Ryan said he was “outraged” and “frustrated” that the hospital is trying to go back on what Ryan said was the hospital’s “explicit promise” to maintain inpatient mental health and detox services in Kingston, especially at a time, he said, when the county has seen drug overdoses in the county increase 91 percent and suicides double.
He said HealthAlliance promised him it would ensure the services would still be available to county residents and that the move was only temporary because of the pandemic.
“They have now explicitly broken both of these promises and that is something we cannot and will not tolerate,” Ryan said.
Mayor Steve Noble too criticized Westchester Medical Center for going back on its word to the community to provide better health care to the community.
“Taking away our mental health service is not better care for everyone,” he said.
Community activist Rashida Tyler said the decision to move the services out of Kingston is “telling us our community is not worth it.
“You’re sending the message to members of our community (that) you’re not worth it,” Tyler said.