(Aug. 28, 2017) These may not be the worst of times for individuals with serious mental illness in need of treatment, but they are not the best either.
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| Photo by Bob |
For people with mental illness in New York City, there is a tale of two hospital systems. While individuals who require hospitalization for other medical conditions are typically admitted to private hospitals, people with serious mental illness are increasingly treated in the city’s government-funded hospitals. The proportion of beds available to psychiatric patients in public hospitals is three times greater that of private hospitals, according to a report by the city’s independent budget office.
As a result, individuals with serious mental illness are left with the shrinking public hospital bed system for inpatient care that, in New York City and throughout the country, is in high-demand but inadequate supply. When beds are in short supply, patients in psychiatric crisis often end up in hospital emergency rooms.
In its coverage of the report, the New York Times reports that more individuals with mental illness are seeking care in emergency rooms in public hospitals for a psychiatric condition, with 70,000 visits in last year alone. Staff writer Ben Mueller writes, “people continue to show up at emergency rooms, whether for shelter or because of a psychiatric emergency, and health authorities need to provide more alternatives.”
Since 2012, almost 200 psychiatric beds in private hospitals throughout the city have closed. Financial pressures on private hospitals create an unwillingness to admit the most vulnerable and often most expensive psychiatric patients, pushing private hospitals to transform psychiatric units to use for more lucrative procedure-based care such as cardiac intensive care units, according to the New York Times.
Learn more about how New York State compares to other states in number of inpatient beds and about the consequences of the closure of public psychiatric beds.