Healthcare Update Satellite — 11-20-2013

This report says that mental health patients make up almost half of the emergency department patients at Denver Health every weekend. When you cut funding for psychiatric care by 20% and cut the number of psychiatric beds by 30%, the patients with psychiatric problems don’t just disappear. When they can’t get help, they end up in the emergency department, in jail, or even worse. Could the Columbine or Aurora shootings have been prevented by expanding psychiatric care? Probably not. But one emergency department physician noted that for every “high-profile event that everybody knows about, there’s a hundred that were either near misses … or resulted in violence.”
Source: WhiteCoat's Call Room - Category: Emergency Medicine Doctors Authors: Tags: Healthcare Update Source Type: blogs