RALEIGH
North Carolina's first mental-health hospital is transferring its patients and staff to other hospitals as it prepares to close at the end of the year.
Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh will transfer all of its patients by the year's end.
The patients will be moved to hospitals in Butner and Goldsboro.
Some of the staff will stay at Dorothea Dix to run a unit for patients in the criminal justice system, but most of the more than 800 staff members will transfer to the other hospitals.
The General Assembly did not budget money to operate the hospital during fiscal year 2010-11. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Lanier Cansler said Tuesday that the state had to cut $28 million.
Moving patients and services to the other hospitals saved about $15 million.
"We have been forced to make some very difficult decisions to address this shortfall," Cansler said.
In a letter, Cansler praised the staff at the hospital and urged them to take jobs at the other hospitals.
Dix opened in 1856.
The state decided to close it in 2002 in hopes of saving money.
It was scheduled to be closed in 2008, but a lawsuit blocked it.
No decision has been made about what to do with the hospital's 300-acre campus.
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