Mississippi Today
State’s first long-term medical home for kids to open at long last in 2025
Following several delays and scrutiny over funding and location, construction of the state’s first skilled pediatric facility is underway in Jackson.
The Alyce G. Clarke Center for Medically Fragile Children will care for patients younger than 19 with complex medical conditions, providing long-term care for some children and training for others’ families to care for them at home.
“For long-term residents, this will feel like a home,” said Dr. Alan Jones, associate vice chancellor for health affairs at the University of Mississippi Center, in a press release. “They won’t feel like they are in a hospital, even though they will be provided with the same level of care.”
Construction of the 20-bed facility began this spring and is planned for completion by fall 2025.
This is the second time the project has broken ground. The center held its first groundbreaking ceremony in 2019, a month before former Gov. Phil Bryant left office, and planned to begin construction in 2021.
Jones said the COVID-19 pandemic slowed the project, attributing the delay to rising costs and supply chain issues.
UMMC awarded the $12.2 million contract to Mid State Construction Co., Inc in February. The total project costs are estimated at $15.9 million.
The project will be funded by $14.5 million in bonds awarded by the Mississippi Legislature in 2019 and 2020, though the project was initially intended to be paid for by private funders.
The state Legislature originally passed a law in 2018 to lease state owned land off Ridgewood Road in Jackson to a nonprofit, which would construct, own and operate the facility. Then-First Lady Deborah Bryant’s chief of staff set up the nonprofit that would spearhead and fundraise for the project, Mississippi Center for Medically Fragile Children, that year.
Nancy New, the Families First leader who pleaded guilty in 2022 for her role in channeling Mississippi welfare grant funds for illegal projects, served on the nonprofit’s board.
Tax returns from 2018 to 2020 show Mississippi Center for Medically Fragile Children raised $3.2 million. The Clarion-Ledger reported that UMMC made a $1 million donation to the center. In 2020, after New was arrested, she was removed from the board, the nonprofit dissolved and Children’s of Mississippi, the pediatric division of UMMC, assumed responsibility for the project. The nonprofit transferred its remaining $1.3 million to UMMC.
The Clarion-Ledger reported in 2020 that Families First, the program New ran through her nonprofit Mississippi Community Education Center, was “a partner of the project and will offer services to families at the facility,” according to Mississippi Center for Medically Fragile Children’s now-defunct website. State Auditor Shad White, who investigated the sprawling fraud scheme, said he did not find any evidence of payments between New’s nonprofit and the center.
However, Mississippi Department of Human Services’ ongoing civil suit, which serves as the state’s effort to recoup millions in allegedly misspent welfare funds, describes Families First’s original proposal to use welfare funds to build the pediatric facility as a “model” for alleged misspending that followed – the construction of a volleyball stadium at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Before New’s nonprofit entertained entering a $5 million sublease with University of Southern Mississippi Athletic Foundation, allegedly as a way to circumvent the federal prohibition on using welfare funds for “brick and mortar” projects, the idea was for her nonprofit to enter a similar lease to build the pediatric facility with welfare funds, emails show. It’s unclear why that lease was never executed, according to MDHS’s lawsuit, but White acknowledged to The Clarion-Ledger that New “could have directed funding to the center by other means.”
Patients at the new center will include newborns who require additional time on ventilators to adolescents that require skilled nursing care. The conditions of patients at the center will range from children who have been injured in accidents to those who have congenital or genetic conditions.
Children’s of Mississippi has for years provided long-term care to patients in an acute-care hospital setting. The new center will provide a more comfortable setting for long-term care.
“This new facility is designed to look and feel like each room is an individual home,” said Dr. Christian Paine, chief of the Division of Pediatric Palliative Medicine at UMMC. “In addition, children whose families are training to learn the skills necessary to eventually move home with medical technology will have a more home-like environment in which to learn.”
The new pediatric facility is named for former Rep. Clarke, the first African American woman to serve in the Mississippi Legislature and an advocate for the project. She became involved when Calvary Baptist Church in west Jackson, the area Clarke represented, planned to renovate its building to house the center. After years of working on the proposal, the church was later left out of the plan. Some lawmakers accused state leadership of hijacking the church’s proposal to change the location to east of the interstate, next to the wealthier neighborhood of Eastover.
“It appears that it’s difficult for people to understand that we want good, nice things in our neighborhood, too,” Clarke said at the time in 2018.
“What I was trying to do was to improve that area over there and the fact that it’s not in the area, it doesn’t make me feel good,” Clarke told Mississippi Today on Thursday. “But at least I’m glad they’re finally getting to work on it and it’s something that we’ve needed for years.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1946
Dec. 23, 1946
University of Tennessee refused to play a basketball game with Duquesne University, because they had a Black player, Chuck Cooper. Despite their refusal, the all-American player and U.S. Navy veteran went on to become the first Black player to participate in a college basketball game south of the Mason-Dixon line. Cooper became the first Black player ever drafted in the NBA — drafted by the Boston Celtics. He went on to be admitted to the Basketball Hall of Fame.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Podcast: Ray Higgins: PERS needs both extra cash and benefit changes for future employees
Mississippi Today’s Bobby Harrison talks with Ray Higgins, executive director of the Mississippi Public Employees Retirement System, about proposed changes in pension benefits for future employees and what is needed to protect the system for current employees and retirees. Higgins also stresses the importance of the massive system to the Mississippi economy.
READ MORE: As lawmakers look to cut taxes, Mississippi mayors and county leaders outline infrastructure needs
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
‘Bringing mental health into the spaces where moms already are’: UMMC program takes off
A program aimed at increasing access to mental health services for mothers has taken off at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
The program, called CHAMP4Moms, is an extension of an existing program called CHAMP – which stands for Child Access to Mental Health and Psychiatry. The goal is to make it easier for moms to reach mental health resources during a phase when some may need it the most and have the least time.
CHAMP4Moms offers a direct phone line that health providers can call if they are caring for a pregnant woman or new mother they believe may have unaddressed mental health issues. On the line, health providers can speak directly to a reproductive psychiatrist who can guide them on how to screen, diagnose and treat mothers. That means that moms don’t have to go out of their way to find a psychiatrist, and health care providers who don’t have extensive training in psychiatry can still help these women.
“Basically, we’re trying to bring mental health into the spaces where moms already are,” explained Calandrea Taylor, the program manager. “Because of the low workforce that we have in the state, it’s a lot to try to fill the state with mental health providers. But what we do is bring the mental health practice to you and where mothers are. And we’re hoping that that reduces stigma.”
Launched in 2023, the program has had a slow lift off, Taylor said. But the phone line is up and running, as the team continues to make additions to the program – including a website with resources that Taylor expects will go live next year.
To fill the role of medical director, UMMC brought in a California-based reproductive psychiatrist, Dr. Emily Dossett. Dossett, who grew up in Mississippi and still has family in the state, says it has been rewarding to come full circle and serve her home state – which suffers a dearth of mental health providers and has no reproductive psychiatrists.
“I love it. It’s really satisfying to take the experience I’ve been able to pull together over the past 20 years practicing medicine and then apply it to a place I love,” Dossett said. “I feel like I understand the people I work with, I relate to them, I like hearing where they’re from and being able to picture it … That piece of it has really been very much a joy.”
As medical director, Dossett is able to educate maternal health providers on mental health issues. But she’s also an affiliate professor at UMMC, which she says allows her to train up the next generation of psychiatrists on the importance of maternal and reproductive psychiatry – an often-overlooked aspect in the field.
If people think of reproductive mental health at all, they likely think of postpartum depression, Dossett said. But reproductive psychiatry is far more encompassing than just the postpartum time period – and includes many more conditions than just depression.
“Most reproductive psychiatrists work with pregnant and postpartum people, but there’s also work to be done around people who have issues connected to their menstrual cycle or perimenopause,” she explained. “… There’s depression, certainly. But we actually see more anxiety, which comes in lots of different forms – it can be panic disorder, general anxiety, OCD.”
Tackling mental health in this population doesn’t just improve people’s quality of life. It can be lifesaving – and has the potential to mitigate some of the state’s worst health metrics.
Mental health disorders are the leading cause of pregnancy-related death, which is defined by the Centers for Disease Control as any death up to a year postpartum that is caused by or worsened by pregnancy.
In Mississippi, 80% of pregnancy-related deaths between 2016 and 2020 were deemed preventable, according to the latest Mississippi Maternal Mortality Report.
Mississippi is not alone in this, Dossett said. Historically, mental health has not been taken seriously in the western world, for a number of reasons – including stigma and a somewhat arbitrary division between mind and body, Dossett explained.
“You see commercials on TV of happy pregnant ladies. You see magazines of celebrities and their baby bumps, and everybody is super happy. And so, if you don’t feel that way, there’s this tremendous amount of shame … But another part of it is medicine and the way that our health system is set up, it’s just classically divided between physical and mental health.”
Dossett encourages women to tell their doctor about any challenges they’re facing – even if they seem normal.
“There are a lot of people who have significant symptoms, but they think it’s normal,” Dossett said. “They don’t know that there’s a difference between the sort of normal adjustment that people have after having a baby – and it is a huge adjustment – and symptoms that get in the way of their ability to connect or bond with the baby, or their ability to eat or sleep, or take care of their other children or eventually go to work.”
She also encourages health care providers to develop a basic understanding of mental health issues and to ask patients questions about their mood, thoughts and feelings.
CHAMP4Moms is a resource Dossett hopes providers will take advantage of – but she also hopes they will shape and inform the program in its inaugural year.
“We’re available, we’re open for calls, we’re open for feedback and suggestions, we’re open for collaboration,” she said. “We want this to be something that can hopefully really move the needle on perinatal mental health and substance use in the state – and I think it can.”
Providers can call the CHAMP main line at 601-984-2080 for resources and referral options throughout the state.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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