By Gayle White and Andy Miller in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta has issued an unprecedented alert that it cannot accept any more mental health patients. As a result, patients who continue to show up can expect to wait up to 48 hours for a bed, at Grady or another hospital, or be released to the community with few appropriate support services, according to Grady officials.

Grady officials say the situation reflects a crisis in Georgia’s public mental health system. This issue has intensified as state-run psychiatric facilities began admitting fewer patients after a federal investigation revealed that overcrowding and staffing issues put patients in “immediate jeopardy” of physical harm.

The saturation of Georgia’s emergency rooms with mentally ill patients echoes a national trend: a shortage of psychiatric beds that forces people who need them, including children, to be “boarded” in emergency departments across the country, according to a survey by the American College of Emergency Physicians.

“The lack of access to psychiatric care is creating a very dangerous situation for people with mental illness and for emergency patients in general,” said Dr. Linda Lawrence, president of the emergency physicians organization.

See earlier post here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 1:00 pm and is filed under NOT2BEMISSED, hospitals, 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.