This week, we would like to share an article published yesterday in the Boston Globe. This article highlights disparities in the public health system that START actively works to address.
Excerpts from the article:
Mentally ill patients idle for hours and even days in emergency rooms waiting for treatment, while patients with medical problems rarely experience these holdups, according to a study of 10 Massachusetts hospitals released Wednesday.
The study included 871 patients who had a mental health evaluation in one of 10 Massachusetts hospitals during a two-week period in 2012. During those two weeks, patients who came into the emergency rooms and needed to be admitted to the hospital or transferred to another hospital for a medical issue spent 4.2 hours and 3.9 hours, respectively, in the emergency room. Patients with mental health needs spent 16.5 hours for an admission to the hospital and 21.5 hours for a transfer to another hospital.
“Nowhere else in medicine do we have the sickest patients staying in the emergency room the longest,’’
- Dr. Suzanne Lippert
Clinical Assistant Professor, Emergency Medicine, Stanford School of Medicine
Mentally ill patients generally get medication in the emergency room, but they do not usually receive active treatment with a psychiatrist or social worker or the benefits of group therapy or instruction on managing their illness. Boarding also is hard on staff, many of whom are not trained to care for psychiatric patients.
Dr. Jennifer Brown, associate chair of psychiatry at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, agreed that trying to get a patient admitted to a psychiatric hospital or unit “is quite cumbersome.’’ Emergency room staff do a statewide bed search, and if they find an open bed, they fax information to the hospital about the patient’s medical condition and history. Some hospitals will turn down a patient who is too violent or has other disorders, such as autism.
