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The home for VPR's coverage of health and health industry issues affecting the state of Vermont.

Brattleboro Retreat CEO Rob Simpson Stepping Down

The brick exterior of Brattleboro Retreat.
Toby Talbot
/
Associated Press File
Brattleboro Retreat CEO Rob Simpson says he will leave the hospital at the end of 2015.

The president and CEO of Brattleboro Retreat is stepping down at the end of the year, hospital officials announced last week. Dr. Rob Simpson is leaving his role after nine years at Brattleboro Retreat, where he’s overseen a growth in staff and patient capacity and the hospital’s focus on mental health and drug treatment services.

“We knew we wanted to meet what we felt was the unmet demand for mental health and addictive services in the region,” Simpson said in an interview.

He said the hospital had already undergone many changes, including new specialty programs for psychiatric care, when Tropical Storm Irene hit in 2011 and caused the sudden closure of the Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury.

“We responded by creating a new unit for the state hospital patients,” Simpson said. That wasn’t the only growth under his watch. “We went from about maybe 54 beds in operation to today we’re at 122 beds in operation.”

As the effects of Tropical Storm Irene slowly faded, another crisis was brewing. It’s one Simpson said he knew he wanted Brattleboro Retreat to address.

“I think addiction has been maybe flying under the radar a little bit, virtually around the country, but the explosion of the opiate crisis across the nation has certainly been happening in the last four or five years,” he said. “We’ve always had addiction services at the retreat for many, many, many years, but we expanded our services to respond to that crisis.”

The Brattleboro Retreat is part of the state’s “hub and spoke” model for opiate addiction treatment.

The hospital has had challenges with government as well. It has hada number of violations in recent years when inspectors checked compliance with quality of care standards set out by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“We’re involved with illnesses that are very complex, and we’ve also recruited numbers of new employees,” he said. “We went from somewhere in the 390s to over 870, close to 900 employees at the retreat.”

Simpson said that growth has led the retreat to increasingly focus on quality of care, and said that commitment shows in the renewal of Brattleboro Retreat’s accreditation from The Joint Commission.

Simpson said he hopes Vermont – and Brattleboro Retreat – will continue to focus on mental health and addiction issues, and continue improving the connection between those services and patients’ overall health.

“People are not uni-dimensional,” he said. “Our bodies are made up of many organisms that determine our health throughout life, and the relationship of addiction and mental illness to general medicine is certainly well-researched, but not necessarily well-integrated.”

Simpson is leaving the hospital at the end of 2015, and says a search is already underway for his replacement. He will continue to work on philanthropic efforts for the retreat on a part-time basis, he says, but is moving to Linkage, a consulting company.

Taylor was VPR's digital reporter from 2013 until 2017. After growing up in Vermont, he graduated with at BA in Journalism from Northeastern University in 2013.
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