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Hospitals routinely board mentally ill patients in ER waiting rooms

Quality Improvement Monitor, July 11, 2008

The death of a New York woman, who lay prone on a psychiatric emergency room for an hour before someone checked on her, has ignited outrage nationwide. But the practice of dumping mentally ill patients in the emergency room is a lot more common than the public believes, according to the Associated Press (AP).

The American College of Emergency Physicians conducted a survey of hundreds of hospitals that found 79% of organizations routinely "boarded" psychiatric patients in their waiting rooms for some period of time because of the lack of immediate services, the AP said. Thirty-three percent of the hospitals said patients waited an average of at least eight hours, and 6% said psychiatric patients waited for more than 24 hours. The study was released last month.

"We try to find a place to put them," David Mendelson, MD, an emergency physician in Dallas who wrote the ACEP report, told the AP. "Unfortunately, sometimes the only thing we can do is restrain them, or medicate them" he said.

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