The need is there, and it's serious. Despite some improvement over the last couple of years, the number of behavioral-health patients in our area waiting too long for a state psychiatric hospital bed remains high. This problem must be resolved, including by the state allocating adequate money for community beds.
According to a study conducted by the Wake County chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, in Forsyth County between April and June of 2011, 113 patients were placed on a wait list, including 49 who waited at least three days and 17 who waited at least seven. One wait was nearly 30 days. This creates huge problems for the mentally ill and their families, and for law-enforcement officers.
Forsyth Medical Center and Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center keep behavioral-health patients while they wait for spots in state hospitals. Law-enforcement officers have to wait with the patients, leaving the streets less safe.
Despite adding 11 beds in the last two years, Forsyth had 39 people on a wait list, with 15 patients waiting at least three days and six at least seven days. The longest wait time was 17½ days. At Wake Forest, the longest individual wait was nearly 30 days.
Old Vineyard Behavioral Health Services added 50 beds for a 24-hour psychiatric emergency department in September, which has taken some pressure off other facilities, but there have still been delays — four of at least seven days. The longest wait was nearly 28 days. Kathy Murray, the director of business development for Old Vineyard, told the Journal's Richard Craver that the new beds have been nearly filled to capacity most nights.
Todd Clark, the director of behavioral-health services for Forsyth Medical Center, said that "Changes we've made internally in handling behavioral-health patients have reduced the average wait time from 38 hours at the start of 2011 to below 20 hours now. A quick-look process with a behavioral-health team has cut down the time that a patient is first seen from 4½ hours to 18 minutes."
But he acknowledged that "It's a failure when the behavioral-health patient enters the emergency department as a portal to behavioral-health care rather than them being treated in the community well beforehand."
Progress has been made, but not enough progress.
Our mental-health-care system has been broken for some time, despite efforts to reform it. It doesn't help that our legislature in Raleigh approved $45 million in cuts to behavioral-health services last year.
We continue to fail some of our most vulnerable citizens and their families. Mental illness is real, debilitating and painful. Sometimes if immediate assistance isn't available, patients can become desperate and do harm to themselves or others. We've got to do better.
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