When patients suffering from severe drug addiction and mental illness have nowhere else to go, they’re often referred to the Community Addiction Recovery Enterprise (CARE) program in St. Peter, which offers treatment to chemically dependent adults with some of the highest support needs.
But the state-run CARE program is now at a crossroads, as a recent proposal from the Minnesota Department of Human Services would shut down the program and repurpose the facility to expand patient capacity at the Forensic Mental Health Program at the St. Peter Regional Treatment Center.
On Monday, workers at CARE St. Peter and members of the AFSCME Council 5 labor union picketed outside Minnesota Square Park on Highway 169 to protest the proposed repurposing of the St. Peter CARE program as well as the closure of the CARE program in the city of Carlton.
“By closing down CARE they’re going to put those staff out of a job and they’re not going to have any treatment for chemically dependent adults,” said Ryan Chates, President of AFSCME.
In a House Human Services Finance Committee meeting on April 9, Wade Brost, Executive Director of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Treatment Services, told state representatives that DHS was facing “tremendous pressure” to increase bed capacity in its mental health services program, treating those committed as mentally ill and dangerous.
The Anoka Metro Regional Treatment center is currently at full capacity while St. Peter currently has one unit unfilled due to staffing shortages. With increases to staffing and a declining vacancy rate however, Brost anticipated the wing would be opened up within a few months.
Building a new facility to increase capacity would take approximately 3-4 years, said Brost, but repurposing the 16 beds in St. Peter’s CARE program for the Forensic Mental Health would allow DHS to more rapidly transfer patients from Anoka to St. Peter and free up more space at the metro hospital.
More openings at Anoka would allow the DHS to admit an additional 75-100 Forensic Mental Health patients per year, but would dramatically reduce CARE’s capacity statewide. CARE currently has 64 beds, but shuttering the St. Peter and Carlton facilities would slash capacity in half down to 32 beds.
“Increasing access to hospital beds in a time with a low budget and tremendous pressures, we had to make a challenging choice and that choice was to focus on increasing access to hospital beds while decreasing our residential treatment programs,” Brost told lawmakers.
AFSCME union members like Kendra Kaupa raised concern that the proposal would leave current patients at the CARE program with no alternative options. The St. Peter CARE program deals with high acuity patients, people with severe conditions who require close monitoring and specialized treatment that many private providers can’t often. Kaupa said that many of the patients have current or prior behaviors that are difficult for many treatment centers to respond to and are in need of frequent medication changes and 24-hour supervised care.
“Unfortunately nowhere else in the state will take these clients a lot of the time,” said Kaupa/ “They burn bridges with treatment centers, they’ve been kicked out of treatment centers and we’re the ones that will take them even when they’re at their lowest.”
Brost told lawmakers that DHS would continue to serve as many people as possible at CARE’s remaining facilities and would have a waitlist for admission. But union members said CARE at its current capacity already has a running wait list due to the high demand for services.
“The wait list just means they’re not going to get treated,” said Chates.
Union member Brooke Hobbs worried that the consequences could be fatal for patients if they are unable to access treatment. Many of the clients CARE takes in are treated for addiction narcotics like fentanyl, which carry a high risk of overdose.
“It’s hard to believe we’re even talking about closing a substance abuse treatment center in the middle of an opioid epidemic,” said Hobbs.
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