Lebanon — A psychiatrist who has worked for 26 years at New Hampshire Hospital has been named the interim chief medical officer at the 162-bed Concord facility, Darmouth-Hitchcock announced on Tuesday.

Alexander de Nesnera, whose previous title was associate medical director, will take over the top medical job at the state’s main facility for care for people with severe mental illness, according to D-H.

The leadership shuffle at New Hampshire Hospital came after a year of controversy that included the departure of about a dozen psychiatric professionals who had balked at having their positions moved to the D-H payroll.

De Nesnera has been a unifying figure, according to several observers, including Ken Norton, executive director of the New Hampshire affiliate of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an advocacy organization for patients and families.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever worked with a finer psychiatrist than Alex de Nesnera,” Norton said. The new interim CMO is an excellent clinician and has “terrific relations with patients, with their families and with their families,” Norton added.

And Matt Davis, a former New Hampshire Hospital psychiatrist who left rather than work for D-H, also hailed de Nesnera as “a role model psychiatrist and somebody that I strive to emulate.” De Nesnera, Davis said, is “an excellent clinician and a great teacher.”

De Nesnera will fill a vacancy that opened Jan. 15 with the departure of David Folks, who had been the top doctor at the Concord hospital for eight years.

Meanwhile, D-H will search for a permanent replacement, D-H spokesman Rick Adams said.

The Lebanon-based health system is “retaining a search firm to assist our D-H search committee, which will be in place soon,” Adams said in an email. “We’re hopeful that we may have a successor named by the fall.”

Folks, who as chief medical officer oversaw clinical services and staff, had announced his plans to depart a few days before the Oct. 1 effective date of a 32-month, $36.6 million contract under which D-H took over providing medical services at the state hospital.

Those services had previously come under a contract with Dartmouth College, which was the institutional parent of D-H’s psychiatry department until a restructuring plan shifted it over to D-H last year. The restructuring plan was aimed at eliminating a deficit at the college’s Geisel School of Medicine, where both Folks and de Nesnera hold faculty appointments.

The terms of the new contract and the process by which it was awarded became an issue in last fall’s race for governor.

The controversy was sparked by some Dartmouth psychiatrists who worked at New Hampshire Hospital and balked at the prospect of becoming D-H employees. It was fueled by the suicide of a patient who had recently been released from the hospital.

In October, InDepthNH, an investigative news site, reported that both Folks and de Nesnera had sent emails to state officials involved in drafting the request for proposal for a new New Hampshire Hospital psychiatric services contract.

Critics saw in those communications a conflict of interest. State officials said that it was appropriate to seek input from the hospital’s top doctors, but that the RFP was written by state employees.

New Hampshire Hospital, which cares mostly for patients judged to pose a threat to themselves or others, is a critical but stressed link in the chain of mental health services in New Hampshire. A court-appointed reviewer of those services recently found that on an average day during the third quarter of 2016, more than 31 adults were boarded in hospital emergency rooms awaiting space at the state hospital.

D-H has also scrambled to field the professionals needed to provide psychiatric services around the state. Last year it closed one of the two psychiatric wards at its flagship hospital in Lebanon, and transferred some caregivers to Concord. Both psychiatric wards at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center are now open, Adams said.

De Nesnera and Folks co-authored 2010 and 2012 papers recounting lessons from the state hospital’s use of administrative reviews to manage the risks of treating “high-risk, high-profile patients.”

Gary Moak, the chief of geriatric psychiatry at New Hampshire Hospital, will become its interim associate medical director, D-H’s announcement said.

Rick Jurgens can be reached at 603-727-3229 or rjurgens@vnews.com.