Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry Fellowship Patient Population

Patient Population

Baystate Medical Center is a 716-bed level 1 trauma center and tertiary care referral center that serves a unique combination of rural and urban communities in a federally designated healthcare shortage area. We serve the city of Springfield and rural communities of Western Massachusetts. Fellows will treat patients in numerous inpatient medical settings including ward medicine, critical care, oncology, trauma/surgical ICU, cardiac ICU, obstetrics, and emergency medicine on the main campus in Springfield. Fellows will work in community primary care settings through Baystate Medical Center’s broad Integrated Behavioral Health program. The communities served by Baystate Medical include Hampden County plus the towns of South Hadley and Granby in neighboring Hampshire County.

Hampden County is home to 467,871 residents. Springfield is the largest city in the area and third largest in Massachusetts. Three adjacent cities (Holyoke, Chicopee, and West Springfield) join Springfield to create a densely populated urban core that houses over half of the county population. East and west of this central core are smaller communities, a majority with populations under 20,000. The proportion of foreign-born residents in the communities served by Baystate Medical is close to 9%, half the statewide proportion. In Springfield, one in ten residents is foreign born. The county has a higher proportion of residents under 65 with a disability (12%) than the state overall (8%), and Springfield’s proportion of residents with a disability (16%) is fully double that of the state. The estimated poverty rate in Hampden County is 14.3%. Baystate Medical Center houses the Population-Based Urban and Rural Community Health (PURCH) track for UMass-Chan Medical School students. Beyond the communities served at Baystate Medical Center, fellows will also provide care virtually to community hospital sites (with Baystate Medical Center faculty supervision) including Baystate Noble Hospital, an 85-bed acute care community hospital in Westfield, MA; Baystate Franklin in Greenfield, MA (89-bed hospital); and Baystate Wing in Palmer, MA (68-bed hospital).