Recession fills area’s ER beds with mentally ill State ‘back to square one’ on issue, official says

On Thursday, nearly one-third of the patients in Las Vegas Valley emergency rooms were awaiting psychiatric care.

That morning’s tally — 117 people whose minds had unraveled to a point where they were considered a danger to themselves or others — was higher than the number cited when Clark County declared a mental health emergency in 2004. The resurgence has health care officials concerned that the stress of the economic collapse could be fueling another communitywide psychiatric crisis.

A coalition formed to address the issue five years ago stopped meeting in 2007. But its members regrouped Thursday to try, once again, to reconcile an increasing demand for psychiatric care with a dwindling supply.

“There are more people in crisis, we still have overcrowding and a lack of services, bringing us kind of back to square one,” said Janelle Kraft Pearce, a retired Metro Police official and chairwoman of the Southern Nevada Mental Health Coalition.

She was speaking to a group that included directors of hospital emergency rooms, psychiatrists, drug and alcohol abuse counselors, and state mental health officials. Many of them had come together in years past to talk about the same problem.

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Study will try to improve how mentally ill are cared for in ERs Hospitals have seen increase in mentally ill patients.

Mental health experts in Austin are hoping a research project will help them revamp the way psychiatric patients are treated in emergency rooms.

Advocacy Inc., an Austin-based organization focused on disability rights, is examining what happens to mentally ill patients brought to Austin hospitals because of a psychiatric crisis. The organization will look at things such as how they are medically cared for, how staffers treat them personally and how the environment of often-chaotic emergency rooms affects their mental illnesses.

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Mentally ill face extra-long ER waits

Psychiatric patients who need hospitalization wait for hours in emergency departments for admission because hospitals are dropping mental health units and beds are scarce, a new survey says.

Nearly 80% of hospitals said mentally ill patients sometimes wait four hours or more to be admitted, says the American College of Emergency Physicians, which surveyed 328 emergency medical directors. About 10% said patients wait more than a day on average.

Average admission times for non-psychiatric patients were shorter: Only 30% of directors said those patients waited four hours or more. Yet 84% of the medical directors said ER wait times for all patients would drop if their hospitals had better psychiatric services.

Only half of the hospitals surveyed had psychiatric units. The rest transferred patients, sometimes far from homes and families. Hospitals are closing their units because of inadequate payments from government and insurers, unpaid costs for the uninsured and too few psychiatrists willing to work in hospitals, says James Bentley of the American Hospital Association.

READ MORE @ USA TODAY