Word: mentality
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...decades, everybody in New Orleans knew the drill, from police and emergency medical responders to the patients who managed to get there on their own. In a mental health emergency, the destination of choice was the 24-hour crisis intervention unit at Charity Hospital in downtown New Orleans, where a team of specialists could quickly evaluate patients who were a potential danger to themselves or others, stabilize those that could be medicated and referred to one of the city's outpatient clinics and admit the hardest cases to the hospital's psychiatric ward, where the 96 beds were fully occupied...
...Terry Ebbert, the director of New Orleans' Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, calls it nothing less than "a crisis in emergency mental health care." In March, Ebbert says, emergency medical service teams logged more than 300 hours in wait time at local emergency rooms, waiting for space to open up for people needing psychiatric care. The New Orleans Police Department, stretched perilously thin since the storm, had 207 cases in the same period where cops waited up to three hours with patients picked up for mental health disorders, or had to drive miles to a suburban ER that...
...services, but of the 200-plus psychiatric beds that existed in the city prior to Katrina, only 20 are in service at the moment. The number of psychiatrists and psychologists has dwindled and, despite a federally funded recruitment program, hospitals report difficulty finding doctors and nurses who specialize in mental health. All this at a time when, mental health experts say, the actual number of people needing such services has increased, even as the city's population remains diminished by half...
...crisis intervention unit, either in a reopened third floor at Charity or in a designated section of University Hospital, an L.S.U. medical school affiliate that houses the city's only trauma center and where, on one recent night, 18 of the emergency department's 23 beds were occupied by mental health patients. "These patients are still getting their medical evaluations in a routine emergency department. But then they are left there," says Cathi Fontenot, the hospital's medical director. "Emergency departments are not quiet areas of relaxation, especially in a trauma center like ours, where we have gunshot wounds...
...There are some promising signs. The state could provide funding for another 20 psych beds this summer, says Jerome Gibbs, executive director of the Metropolitan Human Services District, which oversees state-run mental health programs in the New Orleans area. University Hospital plans to have a mobile crisis unit operating on a site adjacent to the hospital by June, and is in negotiations with a closed mental health center uptown, where the hospital hopes to lease enough space to open 33 psychiatric beds. But staffing is still a huge challenge, Fontenot says. There are fewer resources available to follow patients...