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Precourt Center looks to heal ‘probably the sickest community from a behavioral health perspective’
Vail Health Behavioral Health Executive Director Chris Lindley shows off the Precourt Healing Center’s state-of-the-art kitchen during an April tour, as Vail Health Public Relations Director Sally Welsh looks on (David O. Williams photo).
Dr. Paige Baker-Braxton is a clinical psychologist who moved to Eagle County three and a half years ago after living in downtown Chicago for about eight years, where she was a trauma therapist.
“I’ve worked with some really marginalized, sick populations — veterans, sexual assault survivors, LGBTQ populations — and [Eagle County] has probably the sickest community from a behavioral health perspective that I’ve seen, even working with all those at-risk populations,” Baker-Braxton said. “But what’s different about here is that we have the community and the resources and support that the other populations I’ve worked with haven’t.”
In 2021, Baker-Braxton moved to Colorado’s high country – scene of so much joy on the ski slopes of nearby Vail and Beaver Creek – to serve as the vice president of Vail Health Behavioral Health clinical services. She found a rural, resort community with a “history of undertreated or untreated behavioral health, substance use — particularly alcohol – isolation, and a lack of resources.”
With a U.S. Census estimated population of just over 54,000 people, Eagle County straddles Interstate 70 from Vail Pass in the east to Glenwood Canyon in the west, dipping down south to include a swath of the Roaring Fork River valley near Aspen. Many of its year-round residents are resort workers struggling to make ends meet in one of the nation’s priciest places to live.
In 2018, there were a record 17 suicides reported in Eagle County – a staggering rate of nearly 30 suicides per 100,000 residents, which was well ahead of both the state and national rates at the time. Those numbers had dipped to “just” nineby the time Baker-Braxton arrived in 2021, but COVID-19 and other factors continued to drive demand for more psychiatric services.
Eagle County residents had already passed a marijuana tax to pay for behavioral health services and started open discussions about the growing crisis when the Colorado Springs Gazette detailed those efforts in 2019 in an award-winning story entitled “The Paradise Paradox”. A film with the same title came out in 2023 and is available on Amazon.
But the biggest catalyst for change was the nonprofit Vail Health hospital launching a $60 million campaign to fill the gap in behavioral health and substance abuse services in the mountains that saw people in critical need held either in the local jail or treated in the emergency room until they could be transported more than two hours away for psychiatric services in either Grand Junction or Denver.
All of that changed on May 5 with the opening of Vail Health’s Precourt Healing Center in Edwards, funded in part by $12 million from that 2019 campaign. With 28 beds – 14 for adults and 14 for adolescents ages 12 to 17 – the new facilityis intended for stays of no more than a week but ideally just three to five days. There are no walk-ins, and patients arrive in a secure ambulance bay.
“These are the only psychiatric beds in all of western Colorado, actually, between here and Salt Lake City. This is it,” said Chris Lindley, executive director of Vail Health Behavioral Health, a nonprofit formed in 2019 and former director of Eagle County Public Health and Environment. A U.S. Army veteran with a master’s in public health and epidemiology who served in Iraq as an Army medic, Lindley said he expects the new facility will be very busy at first.
“Yep, a hundred percent. We’re going to serve as many people as we can, but our model also is we only want to serve them once,” Lindley said. “Our objective is, upon discharge, our team is going to stay with them and continue to work with them, whether they’re in this community or not, through telehealth and different supports, and we don’t want them to come back and visit us. We hope that this is a one and done, and then they’re on the right track going forward.”
About a third of Eagle County identifies as Hispanic or Latino, or more than 16,000 people, and that number is even higher in neighboring and more populous Garfield County, where, according to U.S. Census data, there are more than 62,000 people and more than 20,000 identify as Hispanic or Latino. The new Precourt Healing Center will be there for them as well, hospital officials say.
“We understand the significant stress that can impact our community, particularly among our Spanish-speaking members,” Vail Health Director of Inpatient Behavioral Health Dr. Teresa Haynes wrote in an email statement. “This vibrant community is integral to our local economy and society, and we are dedicated to addressing their specific needs with compassion and care.”
Haynes said the healing center has a team of bilingual caregivers, including three bilingual nurses, four bilingual behavioral health technicians, two bilingual intake specialists, and two bilingual behavioral health providers. The goal is to have at least one qualified, Spanish-speaking staff member on call at all times.
Elizabeth Velasco, a Democratic state lawmaker from Garfield County who spent her teen years growing up in the trailer parks of Eagle County after moving here from Mexico, now represents Garfield, Pitkin and part of Eagle County in the state capitol.
“Our rural resort communities heavily depend on immigrant labor,” Velasco said. “These are diverse communities, and I do think that it’s so important to have that culturally relevant access to [behavioral health] services and that we don’t want to leave anyone behind.”
Velasco laments the recent closure of the West Springs psychiatric facility in Grand Junction but lauds the regional approach of the Precourt Healing Center in Edwards.
“We definitely travel a lot along the I-70 corridor and cross the county lines multiple times,” Velasco said of the Latino community. “So I’m very proud of these regional solutions that are coming up. I also know that it’s very limited, and that we have limited access to providers and facilities, and that the need is huge. It feels like there’s definitely not enough.”
Access to behavioral health services and what will be covered by both private insurance and Medicaid remains a battle both for patients and health care providers. And Congress is currently debating steep cuts to Medicaid spending in its budget reconciliation bill.
“We’re certainly watching the Medicaid discussion at the national level very closely,” Lindley said. “With Medicaid being one of the largest expenditures in the state government here and at the federal level, ultimately, if there’s cuts, there’s going to be cuts likely in the Medicaid area. But how that trickles down to actually degrading care for our patients, that’s unknown.”
Right now, Lindley said Vail Health has a good relationship with its Medicaid managed service organization, Rocky Mountain Health Plans, and that things are going well on that front. But he acknowledges things need to change as far as the overall health care system in the country.
“The bigger story is we’re not healthy in this country, and we’re realizing that the health care system, as it’s designed, and as we all get older, we have more chronic conditions and more issues that go with us, and that just continues to drive the costs,” Lindley said. “It’s models like this [in Eagle County] of how do you get healthy and stay healthy is really where we need to push going forward.”
Eagle County is an aging community, but mental health issues among adolescents and young adults – especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic – have driven much of the push for more services locally, including stepped up counseling in all of the public schools and behavioral health first responders. The idea is to head off issues before someone needs to be admitted to the new facility.
“Adolescents are very near and dear to my heart because I’ve got a lot of experience working with them,” said Haynes, who comes to the Precourt Healing Center from Your Hope Center crisis response. “But this is such a critical level of care. We would like them to not need this as they go into adulthood. Children are where it’s at in terms of if you can provide that support.”
Sarah Johnson, president and CEO of Roundup River Ranch along the Colorado River in northwestern Eagle County, said the regional push to address mental health in the mountains came to her nonprofit, donor-based camp for kids with critical physical health care issues about two years ago. For the first time this summer, the camp will also focus on behavioral health, with free slots for 30 kids ages 11 to 17 for three nights in late June and early July.
“We wanted to be part of that [Eagle County] effort,” Johnson said. “And we went through the conversation of, ‘Should it be called something other than Behavioral Health and Wellness Week? Should it be a disguised name because its stigma is going to keep kids away?’ And we collectively decided that no, mental and behavioral health is health.”
Finally, Eagle County is home to many wealthy residents – including the Precourt family – whose generosity has helped fund many of the programs being put in place now. Asked if it’s a model that will translate to less-affluent rural areas around the nation, Baker-Braxton said yes, the model is transferrable, but it needs to be health care reform.
“I think it can, but it requires a lot of legislative change,” Baker-Braxton said. “We have to have parity. Behavioral health sessions need to be reimbursed at the same rate as medical visits. Going back to our vision of the future, where behavioral health and medical care is talked about the same, it needs to be treated and reimbursed the same so that it can be a sustainable model.”
Editor’s note: A version of this story first appeared in the Colorado Springs Gazette newspaper.
David O. Williams
