Friday, July 16, 2004 | 10:56 a.m.
The state intends to release an estimated $100,000 in emergency funds to temporarily take care of the growing number of mentally ill patients who are filling the emergency rooms in Clark County hospitals.
Michael Hillerby, chief of staff for Gov. Kenny Guinn, said Thursday that Guinn will direct the state budget division to dip into its emergency fund to help pay the WestCare psychiatric care center to continue accepting patients from the hospitals. Without the additional money, WestCare could have been forced to stop taking new mentally ill patients, which could again result in emergency room space being filled by psychiatric patients. The additional funds would last another week or two and would be an interim measure, officials said.
State leaders will decide Wednesday whether to open additional beds for mentally ill patients at a building that used to house developmentally disabled adults at the Southern Nevada Adult Mental Health Services complex, a facility now partially closed.
Both actions are intended to keep the numbers of mentally ill patients in local emergency rooms at a manageable level until a new state mental hospital opens in spring 2006.
The problem, which reached a crisis point at the end of last week, is that too many psychiatric patients are ending up in emergency room beds without an adequate facility for them to be released to.
People who have psychiatric problems and are taken to an emergency room have to be seen for physical problems first. If they are medically cleared, they wait until they are seen by a psychiatrist and can be held for up to 72 hours while being treated for psychiatric problems. That process creates a logjam in emergency rooms.
Hospital officials were concerned last week that the situation left the area without enough empty emergency room beds to deal with a large influx of patients, because one-third of emergency room beds in Clark County were taken by psychiatric patients. The county and state governments responded to the hospitals' cries with a declaration of a state of emergency last Friday, which made $100,000 available to deal with the crisis.
Carlos Brandenburg, administrator of the state Division of Mental Health and Developmental Services, and state Human Resources Director Mike Willden are working on a longer-term plan to rehabilitate a building at the Southern Nevada Mental Health campus for 28 beds for these patients.
In the meantime, Hillerby said of the mentally ill: "We don't have any other place to put them."
Brandenburg said in June last year there were 1,008 patients in emergency rooms waiting to be admitted to the state's mental health facilities. This June there were 1,758, he said.
The state's mental health hospital in Clark County is filled and doesn't have room for more patients.
Clark County declared an emergency with the emergency rooms filling up. And the state Division of Emergency Planning released $100,000 to allow WestCare to keep accepting the patients. But Brandenburg said that money is exhausted.
Brandenburg and Willden are working on a plan to use a building that formerly cared for mentally retarded patients at the Southern Nevada Adult Mental Health Services complex.
Mary Liveratti, deputy director of the state Human Resources Department, said that on Wednesday state officials will decide whether to move forward with plans to open part of the Desert Regional Center in Las Vegas to house some of the overflow psychiatric patients beginning in August.
The long-range plan would then be to keep the Desert Regional Center beds open until a new state mental hospital opens in March or April 2006.
A rough estimate, Brandenburg said, is that it will cost $175,000 to rehabilitate the building. The cost of staffing and maintaining the facility was immediately unclear. This would be a "provisional plan," for 16 to 18 months until the new state mental health hospital is built in Southern Nevada, Brandenburg said. He said he hopes to have firmer estimates on the rehabilitation costs and also the cost of additional staffing by Wednesday or Thursday.
To finance the provisional plan, the division would have to go to the state Board of Examiners and then to the Legislative Interim Finance Committee for an emergency allocation.
The 2003 Legislature approved an extra $3.3 million to expand the mental health hospital from 88 to 103 beds during the two-year period and authorized the issuance of $32.2 million in bonds to build a new 150 bed-inpatient hospital.
A request was also made during the 2003 Legislature to provide $1.3 million for the state to pay one-third of the share of the cost of the non-profit WestCare Community Triage Center to care for these patients on an interim basis, but the bill never got out of committee.
The county then asked the Legislative Interim Finance Committee for $194,000 but that was denied. And Clark County sought money from the tobacco settlement but came away empty.
WestCare did get $480,000 from the state Bureau of Alcohol and Drug Abuse.
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