Henry Ford Health’s deal to hand off its Madison Heights hospital to Trillium Health Care Management will turn the Dequindre Road campus into an inpatient behavioral-health center and, according to a vendor notice, will wipe out 114 contractor positions tied to day-to-day operations. Henry Ford says the facility’s emergency department will stay open around the clock and will continue to be staffed by its own clinicians, while inpatient and surgical services head to the system’s Warren campus about five miles away. Local officials and providers are framing the move as a way to boost psychiatric capacity even as affected workers are left staring down an uncertain few months.
In a Feb. 5 press release, Henry Ford Health said it has transferred the property at 27351 Dequindre Road to Warren-based Trillium, which plans to renovate the site into a 75-bed inpatient behavioral health hospital and begin work as early as this spring. Under the announcement, Trillium will own, operate and staff the behavioral unit, while Henry Ford will lease back and continue to staff the existing 24-hour emergency department. Renovations are expected to take about a year, and Henry Ford says team members at Madison Heights will transfer to other locations in the system during the transition period.
Outside vendors are absorbing the immediate hit. Compass Group USA filed a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification stating that its contract at the Madison Heights account will end and that it will not keep 114 employees at the site, according to Crain’s Detroit. The WARN lists an effective termination date of April 6, and, as reported from the filing, covers housekeepers, cooks, food-service workers and staff assigned to patient observation and flow. Compass told regulators that when the account closes, its operations at the Madison Heights hospital will end entirely…