Mentally ill people waiting at least two days in emergency rooms for admission to a state hospital. Countless others not seeking help because of such waits, sometimes endangering themselves and others. Law-enforcement officers overworked by the fallout. These scenes play out daily in our state's broken mental-health system. The time for action is overdue.
A new report from the Wake County chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness looked at such problems statewide over the first half of this year. It found that 158 people in the service area of CenterPoint Human Services, the local management entity which oversees public mental-health care in the Forsyth County area, waited at least two days for admission for medical care, the second-largest waiting list among the state's 23 LMEs.
"The situation is abysmal for consumers, families, providers, and hospitals despite the strong and ongoing efforts of advocates and staff," Michael Cottingham, a spokesman for CenterPoint, said in a prepared statement. "It's difficult for everyone to handle escalating demand while statewide resources continue to decline and hundreds of state hospital beds remain unfunded and therefore unused. CenterPoint is committed to continuing collaborative efforts to address this issue and thanks those who have already joined together to make this an ongoing priority."
Some 212 people statewide waited at least seven days for admission. The report also found that 27 percent of those on a waiting list return home without receiving treatment after waiting an average of 44 hours, the Journal's Richard Craver reported.
What makes it even worse is that the waits are an old concern that our leaders in the legislature and the state mental-health-care system should have long since solved. It's part of the fallout from the state's ill-planned overhaul of its mental-health system, which shifted the responsibility for providing care from state psychiatric hospitals to community programs that weren't ready for the overload.
The problem grew worse in the recession, and it costs law-enforcement agencies and hospitals hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. When officers carry out involuntary commitment orders and take someone into custody, they're required by law to stay with them until a doctor or psychologist can examine them. Police sometimes sit in ERs for days, at times with the patient in handcuffs. The problem overloads emergency-room staffs as well.
And even after state hospitals admit patients, they often release them quickly, setting up the cycle to begin anew. Many people with mental illness land on the streets, in homeless shelters or jail.
A 24-hour, 50-bed psychiatric emergency department at Old Vineyard Behavioral Health Services in Winston-Salem, slated to open in 2011, should help some. But much more is needed. We should demand that our legislators and mental-health-care leaders produce a clear and comprehensive reform plan, back it with adequate funding, and quickly execute it.
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