From The Boston Globe:

In the past few weeks, parents and advocates in Massachusetts report that at least a dozen children and teens with mental illness – threatening violence to themselves or others – have waited up to a week in hospital emergency rooms or medical wards waiting for psychiatric beds. Other children have been turned away from treatment.

Among factors contributing to the problem are: the impact of increasing economic stress on children, lack of coordination in the mental health system, and insurance constraints on hospitalization.

Gail Rowell of Reading said that her 18-year-old daughter, Kelly, waited a full week in Merrimack Valley Hospital’s emergency room in March. Kelly has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and developmental disabilities and has been hospitalized 18 times since she was 9 years old. But this wait “was at least double or triple what we’d seen before,” Rowell said.

Children with difficult or multiple diagnoses are often especially hard to place. But “when you’ve got a kid in the emergency room for a week, that’s just wrong,” Rowell said. “It’s outrageous.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 15th, 2008 at 5:32 am and is filed under bipolar, hospitals, insurance, mental health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.