During Thursday night’s Mental Health & Wellness group call we discussed the impact mental health care has on the emergency room and the care of patients there for non-mental health issues.
What we learned about the first-hand experiences from each other was shocking and even frightening. The statistics we found beforehand were just as shocking.
Since their peak in 1955, psychiatric beds in hospitals and outpatient facilities are down 97%. That’s not a typo. 97% fewer beds for psychiatric patients during a period where the scientific and medical communities have learned so much more about mental health and how to treat it.
It doesn’t make sense.
We learned of instances where patients seeking mental health treatment in the emergency room were discharged to homeless shelters because there were no psychiatric hospital beds available anywhere in the state.
In some cases, families were able to intervene before the discharge was complete and the families worked on their own to find psychiatric beds in hospitals out of state for their mentally ill family member.
Stories of the medical staff that deals with patients having no clue how to deal with a mentally ill patient due to lack of training were just the tip of the iceberg and we soon realized that where you live may have something to do with the type of care you receive.
A big problem with the lack of training has to do with staffing issues, budgets and the fact that administrators are spread thin putting out daily fires, rather than finding time to train their staff.
We found out that one of our state capitals has amazing patient care with patient advocates on staff at several different hospitals in the city to make sure that if something does go wrong, someone knows about it and can get right on it.
To sum it up, there are a lot of problems with the mental health system and the emergency room is just one part of a system that sorely needs reworking.
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Talk to you soon.
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