Daily Sitka Sentinel

Healing House to Close As Effect of Sequester

The Bill Brady Healing Center. (Sentinel Photo)

BY SHANNON HAUGLAND
Sentinel Staff Writer
    The Bill Brady Healing Center will shut its doors on April 30, the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium announced today.
    The inpatient drug and alcohol treatment center is operated by SEARHC but is paid for with discretionary funding from the consortium.
    SEARHC President and CEO Charles Clement said today the federal government’s fund sequestration will cut back revenue to the nonprofit health consortium by $3.5 million in the current fiscal year. He estimated the healing center costs $1.5 million a year to operate.
    He said the cut from the Indian Health Service amounts to 5 percent of SEARHC’s annual budget, and that the reduction in expenses must be made before the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30.
    “It feels more like a 10 percent cut,” he said.
    Clement said SEARHC officials didn’t have a great deal of lead time to make their decision on how to deal with the funding cuts.
    “Most folks really believed that the federal government was not going down this path,” he said. “We’re scrambling to deal with the aftereffects.”
    The Bill Brady Healing Center, which opened in 1996, is located on the SEARHC campus, across the street from the old U.S. Navy Bachelors Officers Quarters on Japonski Island. The residential facility can house up to 10 male and female clients at a time.
    SEARHC spokesman Michael Jenkins said the decision to close the facility was a difficult one.
    “It’s an important treatment center for our beneficiaries,” Jenkins said. “It’s very expensive, and it’s out-of-pocket for SEARHC. SEARHC has been looking at ways to cut costs. Upper management and the board looked at various ways, and focused on higher end, out-of-pocket costs.”
    SEARHC notified the 20 to 22 staff members at the healing center that the facility would close at the end of April. Most of the employees will be assigned to other divisions, some will be furloughed without pay until another position opens, and some will be laid off, Jenkins said.
    He said there is a need for drug and alcohol treatment for SEARHC beneficiaries, and the organization will be exploring options for replacing the lost services, perhaps with a high-intensity outpatient program.
    “Management and lead staff are looking at ways of reworking the program to be more self-sustainable,” Jenkins said. “It’s unfortunate it’s happening, but we’re between a rock and a hard place. I have to hand it to management and the board. They’re doing everything they can to minimize the effects that could have happened to the organization.”
    Responding to rumors, Jenkins said that SEARHC will not cancel the training program it runs for the Community Health Aide Program. The training program – not the CHAP program itself – will be on hold until the end of the fiscal year.
    Jenkins said other programs at SEARHC will remain intact.
    “There is nothing else that affects SEARHC as a whole, or the community,” he said. “Heath care services have been untouched and a lot of our programs are untouched.”
    Clement said SEARHC had been dealing with what it saw as a “financial bump” since he took over the position of CEO, and implemented a number of cost-cutting measures.
    “We were thinking, we have to work through this phase, and we essentially did that,” Clement said. “We were looking at breaking even through February.”
    The federal sequestration has thrown the organization another challenge to weather, he said.
    Jenkins agreed but said the organization is up to the challenge.
    “We’re obviously here for the long term,” he said. “This is a hiccup in this whole system of getting money from the federal government. It’s put a crimp in the way we do things and we’ve had to make adjustments. We’re trying to make positive adjustments as much as we can and we have a lot of concerns to address. One, is our employees, and the other is that we continue the quality of care we’re applying to the people we serve. There are always adjustments to make in life, no matter what. We’re taking a planned approach to make it all work out in the end.”