Las Vegas Sun

November 9, 2009

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Editorial: Extraordinary flub in communication

Friday, Feb. 9, 2001 | 9:49 a.m.

Hospital emergency rooms have been overcrowded in the past six months, but as the Sun's Stacy J. Willis reported Thursday, a communication failure has played a role. Emergency room nurses and doctors had been told that the Southern Nevada state mental hospital was full, but it was learned during a meeting of health care professionals Wednesday that this wasn't true: There has only been one day during the past six months when it was at capacity.

There are just 210 emergency room beds at the valley's eight hospitals, but all of them have said they hold as many 20 psychiatric patients a week, illustrating what a problem this has posed. It also is troubling that the mental health hospital's director said he was unaware that his employees had been telling other hospitals that the facility was full.

Division of Mental Health Director Carlos Brandenburg needs to find out how this failure occurred. Not only is it unconscionable that psychiatric patients didn't get the specialized care they needed immediately, but it also is terrible that this contributed to needless overcrowding at other hospitals.

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