Former staff at Spokane youth psychiatric unit blame Providence for closure
InvestigateWest by Kaylee Tornay and Whitney Bryen, January 16, 2025: As youth mental health worsens in Eastern Washington, the decision shrinks available acute services.
Early last year, Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane painted a bleak picture of what would happen without its Psychiatric Center for Children and Adolescents.
As children’s mental health needs escalate, teens in the area would lose access to lifesaving treatment. And other nearby facilities would struggle to fill the gap, Sacred Heart executives wrote in an application for a state Department of Commerce grant in February 2024, obtained by InvestigateWest in a records request.
“If this unit downsized or closed, this would cause even less access in an under-resourced area resulting in patients and families having to travel several hours for inpatient care,” hospital leaders wrote.
Sacred Heart asked the state for $1.8 million to pay for facility upgrades to make the unit safer and “ensure that every child has access to high-quality, affordable and culturally competent mental health care.”
The pitch worked. The state awarded Sacred Heart the full amount it requested.
But Sacred Heart turned the grant down in April. In September, it closed the Psychiatric Center for Children and Adolescents anyway.
The grant application, which said the youth psychiatric unit was operating at an annual $2 million loss, underscores why former employees and health care experts are critical of Sacred Heart and its parent network, Providence, in the wake of the decision. In interviews with InvestigateWest, they cast it as one more step by one of the nation’s largest nonprofit hospital systems to improve its bottom line instead of meeting the needs of an escalating mental health crisis among children.
In the last decade, Sacred Heart repeatedly reduced services and long-term resources in the unit, according to internal emails, public records and interviews. Yet as Sacred Heart cuts youth services in Spokane, the Providence system is pouring more than $1 billion into a hospital expansion in Seattle that sees fewer Medicaid patients. And its executives are making millions.
“If you’re complaining you’re so broke, why are you able to pay these people so much?” said Dr. Cory Alexander, a child and adolescent psychiatrist who resigned from Sacred Heart around the time of the closure. She joined nursing staff and former patients at protests last summer decrying the closure and sounding the alarm about diminishing options for teens in crisis.
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