Riverview Hospital is not Connecticut Valley Hospital

Earlier this week, I called attention to an excellent column by Rick Green in The Hartford Courant. In just the few sentences of text that I wrapped around a link to his article, I managed to completely mangle one major fact and a couple of minor ones. I further proclaimed my ignorance loud and clear with a beautiful image of a vintage postcard. My major mistake was to conflate Riverview Hospital with Connecticut Valley Hospital. These are different entities, serving different patients. Rick Green's column was unambiguously about Riverview Hospital, I mistakenly thought that CVH and Riverview were two different names for the same thing, and used the CVH moniker because that was more familiar to me. Fortunately, within a day of my posting, Dr. Wayne Dailey, Senior Policy Advisor for the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, posted a comment correcting my mistake.

I contacted Dr. Dailey to learn more about CVH and its relationship to Riverview, he very graciously answered my questions about CVH and Riverview. He told me that Riverview was built on land that was formerly part of CVH, but is now completely separate. CVH currently owns 730 acres of land. It provides potable water and Police and Fire Department services to Riverview, but other than that, the two hospitals do not share any equipment or buildings. CVH services solely adults and is operated by the State Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, while Riverview services solely children and adolescents and is operated by the State Department of Children and Families. While Rick Green reported that the cost per patient at Riverview is $860,000 per year, Dr. Dailey told me that the cost per patient at CVH is a much more modest $429,605 per year. In an email, he said, "This rate is determined by the Connecticut Office of the Comptroller, and is similar to the Medicaid rate for any of the large general hospitals in Connecticut."

My apologies for the mistake. Middletown's two state-run mental health facilities on the hill overlooking the river are completely independent.