60 new hospital beds for mental health patients are coming to Anchorage, Mat-Su
Alaska Dispatch NewsNov 25, 2017
"I think it's huge. It's going to be access to treatment,"
At
At
Both hospitals will hire more staff, including psychiatrists, said Svoboda and Taylor.
Both of the new units will take voluntary and involuntary psychiatric patients, they said.
Svoboda and Taylor said they have noticed a steady increase in the number of psychiatric patients showing up at their hospitals.
"Mental health services have just not been able to keep up with the demand," said Svoboda, who is also a registered nurse.
At the moment, the hospitals don't have the capabilities to care for those patients with acute mental illness who need inpatient treatment.
The hospitals refer those patients out, often sending them either to Providence hospital's
Last week, there were five adults waiting for a bed to open up at API, the state's mental hospital, according to
And space has only gotten tighter.
Burns said a shortage of nurses at API forced the hospital to temporarily close 10 of its 80 beds in mid-November. Burns said the hospital had planned to reduce its adult admissions by 10 beds from
At one time in 1990, API had 160 beds.
When beds for psychiatric patients aren't immediately available,
Taylor said she believed the longest they had a patient waiting in an
Svoboda said psychiatric patients face an average wait of 48 hours before they're transferred to another facility. In some cases, the wait has stretched on as long as a week, she said.
Mat-Su maintains two stripped-down "safe rooms" staffed with behavioral health technicians to hold psychiatric patients. Over the years, the use of those rooms has skyrocketed, Svoboda said.
When the two rooms are full, the hospital alerts medics and police. In 2012, that happened five times. Last year, it happened 234 times. So far this year, it has happened almost daily, Svoboda said.
Taylor and Svoboda said they believe several factors are driving the increase in psychiatric patients showing up at hospitals.
It may be that people are just more aware that there's help out there to treat mental health issues, Svoboda said.
The opioid epidemic is also driving the increase, she said.
"People will self-medicate with illicit substances to help relieve them of their symptoms," she said.
She said the hospital will treat patients who are "tweaking out on meth" or who have overdosed on heroin. After they've stabilized the patient, it becomes clear there's also an underlying mental health issue, she said. Substance abuse may also fuel psychotic breaks.
Both
Chard, of the
"I think it's more driven by access issues at the community level for early intervention than it is population growth," he said. "I've heard people say it 9,000 times that people coming in are way more complex than they recall in the past."
He said capacity at community behavioral health centers has been eroded over time by years of cuts to grants as well as low Medicaid reimbursement rates.
Chard said when API downsized to 80 beds the idea was to also increase community-based care. But, he said, that never really happened.
He believes the new behavioral health services at
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