West Springs Hospital in Grand Junction to close, leaving a gap in Western Slope psychiatric care
The hospital is the only psychiatric inpatient facility between Grand Junction and Denver
Mind Springs Health/Courtesy Photo
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct that Mind Spring’s arbitration case with Rocky Mountain Health Plans was related to claims overpayments, not employee allegations and prescription concerns as previously stated.
West Springs Hospital in Grand Junction will permanently close on March 10, leaving a significant gap in Western Slope behavioral health resources. The facility is currently the only inpatient psychiatric hospital between Denver and Salt Lake City.
Leadership from Mind Springs Health announced the closure on Feb. 24, citing West Springs’ financial challenges, uncertainty around the future of Medicaid and health care, and underutilization of its resources.
West Springs has 48 inpatient beds and a psychiatric emergency department for individuals experiencing a mental health crisis. Outpatient services — including outpatient psychiatry services, withdrawal management, therapy and more — offered at the Grand Junction campus will not be impacted by the closure, according to the hospital’s statement.
However, Mind Springs Health announced that its new withdrawal management facility in Glenwood Springs will also permanently close in mid-March.
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The board of directors also announced that the closure would sever the agreement between Mind Springs Health and Larkin Health Systems, signed in November amid ongoing challenges around West Springs’ operations. The past few years for the Grand Junction facility included several state investigations, concerns of prescription errors, deficient care and more. From 2023 up until Dec. 6, 2024, the hospital held a conditional permit from the state.
About a year ago, the hospital’s challenges peaked as the then-CEO announced it had only 30 days of cash flow and was struggling against reputational concerns, intense regulatory scrutiny, staffing challenges and more.
Concerns around its closure were suppressed a month later when Mind Springs announced it entered into an agreement with Rocky Mountain Health Plans, which administers Medicaid in western Colorado. The agreement extended a contract with Rocky Mountain Health Plans for the fiscal year and settled an arbitration case with the company over what Mind Springs owed in claims overpayments.
The closure of West Springs comes as Vail Health Behavioral Health is a few months away from opening a 28-bed inpatient facility in Eagle County.
The Precourt Healing Center will offer inpatient services for crisis stabilization, including seven to nine hours per day of treatment, including individual and group therapy, yoga therapy, art therapy, music therapy and physical movement.
While Vail Health declined to comment on the West Springs closure, a spokesperson said the health care system was “excited and focused on opening the Precourt Healing Center in May.”
Steve Vardaman, the chief operating officer for Eagle County Paramedic Services, said that having more local beds “will undoubtedly provide some additional relief for this finite resource.”
“The entire inpatient mental health system in Colorado typically operates at nearly full capacity,” Vardaman said. “Transporting patients shorter distances to an appropriate facility is always more convenient to patients and more efficient for our EMS system.”
How the Western Slope health care system could be impacted
The hospital’s closure throws uncertainty and concern over many communities on the Western Slope that relied on the psychiatric facility for patients in crisis.
“I think it’s going to be pretty detrimental,” said Dustin Moyer, the CEO of Mountain Family Health Centers, a federally qualified health center serving Eagle, Garfield and Pitkin counties. “We don’t have a ton of behavioral health resources as it is. And so the loss of any resource, especially those that are specific as the psychiatric hospital and the community withdrawal management clinic in Glenwood is going to be a huge loss to our community and to our patients.”
Moyer said that Mind Springs is an important referral partner for Mountain Family, which offers integrated behavioral health services as part of its service model but relies on the provider for outpatient therapy and psychiatric hospital services.
“We’re going to have to reassess what those options look like for our patients when those needs arise,” Moyer said.
Members of the UCHealth Yampa Valley Medical Center shared similar concerns about the impact the closure will have on Routt County and the Western Slope.
“The closure of any hospital providing inpatient psychiatric care contributes to far-reaching impacts on patients, families, communities and in the broader sense, our health care systems,” said Anita Becker, the chief nursing officer at the UCHealth Yampa Valley Medical Center. “Closures often lead to reduced access to care for patients struggling for acute stabilization which may lead to delayed treatments and worsening symptoms.”
In turn, this can increase hospital admissions, emergency room wait times, episodes of crisis and the need for acute crisis stabilization, Becker said.
These encounters treat the immediate patient need but fall short of connecting patients with long-term support and care,” she added.
In light of the closure, Stacey Gavrell, the chief community relations Officer for Valley View Hospital in Glenwood Springs, said Valley View’s other referring relationships “will grow in importance.”
“For patients needing inpatient psychiatric care, it is likely that they will have to travel farther for care as there will no longer be an option for care in Grand Junction,” Gavrell said.
This raises concerns for patients who have to travel far from home for care.
“The best care is often closest to home,” Moyer said. “And so when you’re required to go to Denver or Salt Lake for those services, they’re going to, one, become more inaccessible. Most folks aren’t going to be able to access them. Two, it’s just another verdict for patients that are in pretty serious need of those services immediately.”
In many areas on the Western Slope, patients were already traveling long distances to receive care.
Vardaman said that over the past three years, Eagle County Paramedic Services transported more patients to mental health facilities in Denver and on the Front Range than to West Springs Hospital.
“Patient destination is typically determined by the patient’s doctor and is based almost completely on bed availability,” Vardaman said. “We transported 28 patients total to West Springs since Jan 2022 versus 297 to Denver the Front Range over the same time period.”
In Summit County, Steve Lipsher, the public information officer for Summit Fire & EMS, reported that the agency has rarely transported people to West Springs in the past few years. While Lipsher said the hospital’s closure in Grand Junction will undoubtedly affect bed availability at other facilities in the state, he added that the EMS agency’s “out-of-county transports to mental-health facilities are infrequent” and based on providers’ decisions.
