Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Address for Correspondence: Aimee Moulin. Department of Emergency Medicine, Stockton Blvd. Because the mental health care system in California is fragmented and chronically under-funded, the burden of psychiatric care has predictably fallen on emergency physicians.
Zeller et al 3 provides an answer to the ubiquitous question in emergency medicineβ¦Where is this patient going? Too often for our mental health patients the answer is nowhere fast.
Alameda County has established a dedicated psychiatric hospital with an accompanying crisis stabilization unit. The regionalization of psychiatric care in Alameda allows expedited transfers from local EDs to the psychiatric hospital. The authors report an average time to transfer of 1 hour 48 minutes after completion of medical clearance.
This is a considerable achievement, in comparison to the 6 to 16 hours noted in Stone et al. It would be interesting to know how many of the patients discharged in less than 23 hours were transferred from local EDs versus direct admissions from the field.
It is time that all of our hospitals treat mental health patients with the same urgency as our trauma and medical patients. Regionalization of psychiatric care may prove to have outcome benefits as it has with regionalized trauma centers.
