Vail Health dedicates Precourt Healing Center, Colorado’s new state-of-the-art inpatient behavioral health facility
The Precourt Healing Center will be able to treat 28 patients — half adult and half adolescent — experiencing mental health crises
Chris Dillmann/Vail Daily
The May 5 opening of Vail Health’s Precourt Healing Center, now the only inpatient behavioral health facility between Denver and Salt Lake City, Utah, is a dream come true for many.
A crowd of attendees filled the facility’s lobby Friday afternoon for the Precourt Healing Center’s ribbon cutting. On the facility’s second and third floors, seven patients were already undergoing treatment.
Amanda Precourt and her late father, Jay, led the charge to build the facility and “made what was once a dream a reality,” said Will Cook, Vail Health’s CEO.
Precourt Healing Center is ‘a new kind of hospital,’ offering patient-first care
Amanda Precourt has come face-to-face with the failures of the mental health system.
“Like so many others, I know firsthand what it’s like to struggle with mental health,” she said at Friday’s ribbon cutting. “For a long time, I thought I had to manage it silently. That silence nearly cost me my life.”
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In her late 30s, Amanda Precourt survived a suicide attempt and was placed on a 72-hour hold at Vail Health, then called Vail Valley Medical Center.
“I was locked in a tiny ER room with two armed guards outside my door,” she said. “The way people in mental health crisis were treated in 2013 was inhumane. Not due to lack of care, but because the system was broken.”
She spent 15 weeks in a residential treatment facility outside of Colorado.
“It was without a doubt the most difficult experience of my life and also gave me something I didn’t expect: Clarity,” she said. “I realized that I had survived for a reason: To help others. To use my voice, and to work toward a world where mental health is treated with the dignity and care it deserves, and to do it right here in Colorado.”
Amanda Precourt began working with Dr. Marshall Thomas and George Wiegers on a new model of mental health care, “one that combined clinical excellence with whole person care,” she said. “For four years, we studied what was broken and imagined what could be. We wrote a white paper for a new kind of hospital.”
Twelve years after Amanda Precourt left inpatient treatment, the Precourt Healing Center has become that hospital.
“I realized I had to survive so that I could save others,” she said. “This is a dream 13 years in the making, and this team — you guys knocked it out of the park.”
The Precourt Healing Center is the culmination of a community-led effort, filling in the final piece in the puzzle of a chain of collaborative work to provide wraparound care for patients at every level of the community, from outpatient treatment to immediate crisis.
“If you asked me what I think is one of the most heavily weighted variables in our success equation, it’s the power of collective impact,” Cook said. “It truly does take a valley.”
“What has happened here in six, seven years, I truly don’t believe has ever happened anywhere in this country. This is truly a grassroots initiative where every partner has jumped in and done everything they can to get to where they are today,” said Chris Lindley, the chief population health officer and executive director of behavioral health for Vail Health. “Today, we have a tremendous outpatient system that is up and running, we have what we believe will be the best psychiatric facility in the country — that’s our standard that we’re working to — we have clinicians in schools, we have a 911 response mechanism for crisis, we have so many amazing nonprofits that are doing incredible prevention and education work, and everybody is working together. It’s all of ours, it’s all of our win.”
Jay Precourt died in September 2024. “He was never able to see the hospital completed,” Amanda Precourt said. “I miss Jay every day, I know his presence is here, and he is beyond proud. The Precourt Healing Center is a living legacy. Since the very beginning, this project has been about partnership. Between families, health care professionals, community leaders and generous donors. I am proud to dedicate this space not just in honor of my father, Jay, but in service to this valley and Colorado at large, and to all of us who live here in this beautiful mountain community.”
Precourt Healing Center offers 28 beds for adolescents and adults, holistic therapy treatments
The Precourt Healing Center serves both adolescent and adult patients experiencing acute behavioral health crises. The facility has 28 beds total, to be split between adolescents and adults, and provides holistic care to address every aspect of patients’ behavioral health challenges.
“The Precourt Healing Center represents not only a place of care, but a journey of healing, purpose and possibility. This moment is more than just the opening of a facility. It is the realization of a vision rooted in lived experience,” Amanda Precourt said.
The facility’s unique design separates the 28 beds into four sections across two floors, though the two sections on each floor can be combined.
Every part of the facility, from the art on the walls to the single-bed rooms with their own bathroom to the art, music and exercise therapies to the open-air walled-in areas on each floor has been designed with patient experience and healing in mind.
“It is designated to feel different because it is different,” Amanda Precourt said. “Different from any other inpatient setting I had ever encountered and will ever encounter. Every detail reflects lived experience and the belief that healing is possible when people are met with compassion, safety and respect.”
Construction on the facility began in September 2022. In under two years, Vail Health built the three-floor structure, hired 100 staff members ranging from psychiatrists to therapists to nurses to patient care technicians to nutritional services and created a rigorous training curriculum for all staff.
How have the first 11 days of the Precourt Healing Center gone?
The center opened on May 5, 11 days before the ribbon cutting. “It honestly feels like 11 months,” Lindley said.
There were many unknowns in opening a new inpatient behavioral health facility, so the facility planned to open on a slow roll and to start by accepting only adolescent patients.
The first referral came in for the facility’s first patient on May 6. “That patient had the most extraordinary care,” Lindley said. “The whole team was involved — nursing, psychiatry, psychology, techs, pharmacy — everybody surrounded this kid and provided great care.”
But the team quickly learned that “the real need right now in the state was adults,” Lindley said.
During the first few days, when the facility was not open for adults, three local adults had to go to Denver to receive inpatient care. “That broke all of our hearts, because we want to do the best we can to not allow anybody to leave our community,” Lindley said.
So the team pivoted. By late last week, the facility was open to both adults and adolescents. Of the seven patients being treated at the facility during the ribbon cutting, six were adults.
On average, patients stay for three days before being discharged into a network of outpatient care. By Friday evening, the facility will have treated and discharged into a network of outpatient care its first five patients.
Though the facility was slow to receive patient referrals at first, by Tuesday of this week (the facility’s second week open), “everybody realized we were open. Since Tuesday, we’ve taken every patient that we can based off of our staffing,” Lindley said.
There are now over 20 applicants on the waitlist for treatment at the Precourt Healing Center.
The facility is still hiring and onboarding staff. Lindley said he expects to have 14 beds open to patients by June, and to be operating at full capacity around mid-July.
“The real work is just beginning,” Amanda Precourt said. “We built a state-of-the-art facility, and now we will provide the care required to not just save lives, but to transform individual and community identities, giving hope and a path forward for those who are suffering. Mental health is not an individual issue, it’s a community issue, and this center represents what’s possible when we stop whispering and we start building.”
