“Not all teaching costs and resident times are compensated for, but you have to teach and do the right thing whether you get paid or not,” he said.
Gougeon echoed this point.
“We want to be to be stable enough to support not only research but also clinical care, and to train people to do it,” said Gougeon.
“There’s some uncertainty for funding in teaching and research as that goes through state and federal budgets,” she said.
These factors combined are pushing psychiatric health care into a crisis, Muszynski said.
“We get reports where kids or people sit in rooms for days to get a psych bed—some wait 60 days,” he said. “We are on the brink of a major problem.”
Under these conditions, McLean hospital signed a contract with Belmont to sell 51 of its 238 acres in 1999.
Gougeon said that once the hospital decided that it was going to sell land, McLean began negotiating with Belmont “to come up with something good for us and good for them.”
The residential houses on the sold property will not be family units, she said, but rather will consist of town-house homes which will optimize space.
—Staff writer Risheng Xu can be reached at xu4@fas.harvard.edu.