St. Vincent Charity Medical Center will close its psychiatric emergency room at the end of June, a year and a half after the hospital shuttered its medical ER in Cleveland's Central neighborhood, and 36 years after the psych ER opened.
St. Vincent will not accept new psych patients after 8 a.m. June 30. After that, patients in need of psychiatric emergency assessment or treatment will be transported to the nearest medical ER.
The medical system confirmed the closure Thursday, at the same time that MetroHealth announced its Cleveland Heights campus would open an emergency psychiatric department this fall. The new psych ER will sit adjacent to the Behavioral Health Hospital at Severance Town Center in Cleveland Heights, nine miles from downtown Cleveland. It will receive funding from the Alcohol, Drug Addiction & Mental Health Services (ADAMHS) Board of Cuyahoga County.
"The tradition that we've had about having a dedicated psychiatric emergency room, we don't want to lose that in our community," said Scott Osiecki, CEO of the ADAMHS Board of Cuyahoga County.
The new psych ER will also accept children, whereas the St. Vincent Psych ER did not.
Until the Cleveland Heights psych ER opens, MetroHealth will continue to provide psychiatric care at its four emergency departments, including at its main campus in Cleveland, according to MetroHealth System's CEO Airica Steed.
She said the time gap was needed to fully equip the new facility and hire staff.
"We did not want to risk being too hasty with activation on the basis of our desire to have this in place," she said, adding that because of the interim plan to transport psychiatric patients to medical ERs, she foresaw "no disruption in service.”
The future of St. Vincent's psychiatric ER, which is currently the only one of its kind in Northeast Ohio, had been uncertain since the medical ER closed in November 2022. After that closure prompted confusion from residents and dispatchers who were unaware the ER closed, City of Cleveland officials said they made changes and provided additional training for dispatchers.
St. Vincent, MetroHealth and the ADAMHS Board said in interviews they are coordinating with local police, fire and EMS, city officials and community leaders to spread word of the change.
Some patients' advocates voiced concern when it became evident the St. Vincent psych ER would close. For decades, they said, the ER has played an important role in stabilizing people in psychiatric crisis at a central location.
In regular ERs, there can be long wait times and rooms are not set up for people experiencing a psychiatric episode. In a psych ER, doctors can quickly assess a patient and hold them up to 23 hours to stabilize them. By default, they also free up the few inpatient psych beds for those who need to be hospitalized for longer.
The ADAMHS Board funded the St. Vincent psych ER through 2023.
St. Vincent previously estimated that between 250 and 270 psych ER patients per month will likely seek care at other traditional medical ERs. But St. Vincent's Dr. Charles Garven said patient volumes had decreased substantially since the medical center announced it was closing inpatient services.
"If we're going to be good stewards of this public money, I think we're all in agreement that the service ought to be offered adjacent to a medical emergency department and part of a hospital system that has even easier access to inpatient beds," Garven said.
Capacity for psychiatric patients is a problem statewide. Ohio does not have enough public psychiatric beds to provide minimally adequate treatment for individuals with severe mental illness, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center, a national nonprofit that advocates for treatment for severe mental illness.
Ohio is more likely to incarcerate people with mental illness than hospitalize them, TAC figures show.
