(Aug. 7, 2014) Sharp decreases in psychiatric beds spurred by deinstitutionalization have turned emergency rooms across the country into warehouses for people with mental illness in crisis.
“Psychiatric boarding” is the sanitized term for keeping psych patients waiting in the ER for days, or sometimes months, because no hospital beds are available. But the Washington Supreme Court just made this practice illegal, according to the Seattle Times (State Supreme Court: Dumping mentally ill in emergency rooms illegal,” Aug. 7).
Warehousing patients like this has had far reaching consequences, leaving fewer ER beds available for the public while psychiatric patients do not get the timely and necessary medical care they would have received in a treatment facility.
“The practice traumatizes thousands of mentally ill residents, wreaks havoc on hospitals, and wastes millions of taxpayer dollars,” the Seattle Times has said.
Aside from the suffering and deferred care, psychiatric boarding is expensive. One hospital lost $4 million in revenue because emergency room beds were occupied by people with mental illness who were waiting for a psych bed to open, according to a survey from the Department of Health and Human Services.
Washington’s decision that patients cannot be warehoused in ER rooms is a humanitarian one, but it also means that authorities will have to find a suitable treatment facility for people in a psychiatric crisis.
Currently, the state only has 34 percent of the beds necessary to meet the needs of its population with severe mental illness. To ensure that patients in a psychiatric crisis receive proper treatment and hospitals don’t send patients back to the streets, or worse, the state must begin to restore inpatient facilities so that there are beds available for people when they need them.
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