The rock star Tom Petty's song "The Waiting is the Hardest Part" could be the theme for this state's broken mental-health-care system. Figures released this week showed Forsyth Medical Center ranked third in North Carolina in the number of people who had to wait at least 48 hours for treatment of mental-health issues.
The medical center had 83 people waiting at least two days, with all but six of them held for six or fewer days, according to a breakdown from the Wake County chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Officials at the medical center questioned the methodology of the study and said most people wait a day or less for admission. But the hospital is only doing its best with a problem thrown at it.
"It is a symptom of the ill-planned development of a service system which is supposed to be responsive to a community need -- filling service gaps so that people are met and helped before the crisis," Laurie Coker, the director of the N.C. Consumer Advocacy, Networking and Support Organization, told the Journal's Richard Craver.
The state's ill-planned overhaul of its mental-health-care system shifted the responsibility for providing care from state psychiatric hospitals to community programs that weren't ready for the overload.
The Wake County group released a preliminary report earlier this month on waiting times for mental patients that found that 158 people in the service area of CenterPoint Human Services, the local management entity (LME) that oversees public mental-health care in the Forsyth County area, waited at least two days for admission for medical care, the state's second largest waiting list among the state's 23 LMEs.
These might be little more than numbers on a page to many of us. But for those with mental illness and their families, they're a story that keeps getting worse. Some people with mental problems don't seek treatment because of the waits. But even for those who do, problems can accelerate during the long waits, whether the patient is in a hospital bed or sitting in an ER chair. Law-enforcement officers and ER personnel are pulled away from other pressing duties to look after these patients.
When the legislature reconvenes in January, it should put fixing the broken mental-health-care system at the top of its to-do list. Every day, we're failing some of our most vulnerable citizens. And in so doing, we're failing as a state.
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement