Boston Children’s Hospital is developing a $650 million pediatric psychiatric hospital on Franciscan Children’s campus in Boston following a $100 million donation — the largest in the hospital’s history — aimed at integrating mental health across pediatric medicine and eliminating fragmentation in care.
Stacy Drury, MD, PhD, psychiatrist-in-chief, told Becker’s that, as a child psychiatrist for nearly 30 years, she never expected any children’s hospital to center and value mental health as the foundation of health.
“I know that child mental wellness is the cornerstone to all physical health, so to have a CEO and chair of the board share that same view is, I would say, unimaginable and magical at the same time,” she said.
The project includes 116 inpatient beds and a day hospital with 24 slots for partial hospitalization and intensive outpatient programs, as well as a 14-bedroom, community-based acute treatment program. The building will house a dental suite, a surgical suite with four operating rooms and 10 preparatory and post-recovery slots, a pharmacy and an outpatient rehabilitation space with a gym and therapy pool.
The center will focus on three distinct populations: children with general mental illness who also have a medical comorbidity; children with neurodevelopmental disorders and autism; and childhood mental health prevention.
“To have that capacity in the same building is huge. Families don’t have to choose between getting their dental care and getting their mental healthcare,” Dr. Drury said. “I think being very intentional about the medical complexity kids with neurodevelopmental disorders really need to be within the same place.”
For families navigating the mental health space, many times they are handed a laundry list of options and left to figure it out — something she said does not happen in other areas of medicine.
“Mental healthcare in every place in the world is fractured,” she said.
The centralized campus will allow patients and their families to shift between partial-hospitalization programs to outpatient services and connect them with a higher level of care if needed. This allows families an alternative option other than the emergency department or crisis center.
The system has more than 120 mental health providers embedded in every medical subspecialty except pathology, with behavioral health clinicians providing high-level psychosocial and mental health support, Dr. Drury said. It is also building out a consultation liaison service specifically for the 64 medical rehabilitation beds on-campus, with a focus on having every specialist consult on both the inpatient medical unit and psychiatric unit.
“A neurologist that’s coming to do an EEG on one of our babies that is recovering from brain cancer is just as likely to walk over and see a kid with seizures, who’s in our inpatient psych unit,” she said. “The goal is to have seamless management of medical comorbidity.”
A focus for the campus is ensuring it looks as beautiful as every other area of pediatric medicine, challenging the perception of mental health units as a “dark corner” of clinical settings. The past 100 years of divestment and stigma surrounding mental health have made them places that people do not want to be, she said.
For example, she said leaders intentionally crafted a pediatric oncology unit filled with light and space for children to play while receiving chemotherapy. Whether children need a quiet place to decompress or a place to scream and yell to release frustration, she wants it to be available on the campus.
“It is an incredible time to be at a place that is centering child mental health,” Dr. Drury said. “It’s such an urgent need, because we are losing a generation of kids and the number of things that they have to manage and face is gigantic.”
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