Police chief pledges patient help

Winston-Salem's police chief pledged yesterday his department's support for resolving the issues of monitoring psychiatric patients in emergency rooms.

But Scott Cunningham also offered a challenge to the 35 participants during the nearly 1½–hour meeting of the Forsyth Mental Health Collaborative.

Find ways for all affected groups -- advocates, civic, government, health-care, law-enforcement and CenterPoint Human Services -- to come up with the resources to offer better services to psychiatric patients well before they reach the emergency room.

"Our system right now is not efficient in giving these patients the services they need in their time of crisis," Cunningham said. "If we have adequate services on the front end, it would have a significant impact on limiting multi-day stays in the emergency departments."

The issue has vexed local law-enforcement, health-care and mental-health officials for years -- financially, logistically and in terms of security.

Advocates say they worry that long waits are becoming more common because of a lack of beds in local and state hospitals and psychiatric facilities. For example, in late May the lack of beds for psychiatric patients meant that a local man who was having a mental-health crisis spent more than eight days in the emergency department of Forsyth Medical Center -- at times in handcuffs -- before being admitted to the hospital.

According to police, sheriff's and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center officials, their organizations have spent at least a combined $1.4 million in 2008 and thus far in 2009 on handling mental-health patients.

That includes taking patients to and from local and state health-care centers and hospitals, and providing security services for involuntary commitments in emergency departments.

Advocates and mental-health officials said that the sour economy has contributed to more people with mental illnesses lacking jobs and health insurance.

"The bottom line is that every­thing, every service, has a cost," Cunningham said. "However, the cost to society is higher on the back end than the front end with prevention services."

The impetus for Cunningham's talk with the collaborative was his response to another meeting on the same subject.

That meeting, held July 7, attracted 40 local officials involved in health care, mental-health care and law enforcement, and elected officials from Davie, Forsyth and Stokes counties.

It was initiated by Patricia Murray, a Winston-Salem police captain, and CenterPoint was the host. Cunningham and Murray were at both meetings.

Excluded from the July 7 meeting were mental-health advocates and organizations and the media.

Many advocates were frustrated with that exclusion, as well as what they perceive as a "closed-door policy" by some CenterPoint officials, since they provide training to Winston-Salem police and Forsyth deputies for dealing with a mental- health crisis.

Cunningham said that 90 police officers are trained for crisis invention in cases of someone having a mental-health episode. He said that his goal is for 543 officers to be trained "so that no matter who is available at the time of a call, they are able to handle whatever they encounter."

At the current rate of training, he said, that could take between three and five years to complete.

Betty Taylor, the director of CenterPoint, said after the July 7 meeting that she planned to get the input of local advocates on the emergency-department issue.

Taylor was not at yesterday's meeting, but there were two representatives from the organization.

Many of the advocates said they were pleased with Cunningham's understanding and compassion for their concerns. They urged him to use his leverage to make their input heard by Center­Point and Forsyth County commissioners.

"We can't solve all of the problems in our little corner of the world at one time," Cunningham said. "But we can start biting it off in small chunks. Our department will be at the table whenever we can be."

■ Richard Craver can be reached at 727-7376 or at rcraver@wsjournal.com.