The MetroHealth System on Wednesday announced the opening of its new psychiatric emergency department at the Cleveland Heights Medical Center.
The department is staffed by MetroHealth psychiatrists, behavioral-health trained nurses, nursing assistants and social workers for 24-hour care.
Its opening comes almost four months after Cleveland's only psychiatric emergency room at St. Vincent Charity Medical Center closed in late June. Since then, patients in need of psychiatric emergency assessment or treatment were transported to the closest hospital emergency room.
The idea of a psychiatric emergency department is to create the medical environment of an ER for psychiatric crisis patients, in a locked unit, away from the chaos of a typical emergency room.
MetroHealth's new psychiatric ER has capacity for 13 patients. The hospital system said it will also continue to provide psychiatric care at its four area emergency departments.
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.
The Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services currently operates two psychiatric hospitals in Northeast Ohio, in Northfield and Massillon. Akron's Summa Health also provides psychiatric inpatient services.
Ohio is more likely to incarcerate people with mental illness than hospitalize them, according to TAC figures.
“We can't erase the systemic trauma they've experienced,” said Jane Granzier, director of MetroHealth's crisis emergency services, in a statement. “But what we can do is be a seed of hope to show them that behavioral healthcare can be delivered in a way that’s positive and lifegiving and nonjudgmental.”
The move of the area's only psychiatric ER from central Cleveland to Cleveland Heights has had some people worried.
Angela Cecys, former program manager for the PATH outreach team with Frontline Service, a nonprofit group that provides mental health support, previously told Ideastream that her homeless clients often used St. Vincent because it was located in Cleveland's Central neighborhood and was close to shelters, and that Cleveland Heights is too far away for many of them.
“They don't want people loitering in the psych ED once they've been discharged,” Cecys, who now runs Cleveland's crisis care response program, said. “If that person can't get back to the shelter because they're coming from Cleveland Heights and it's 2 a.m., what are they going to do?”
The new psychiatric ER is funded by the Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services Board of Cuyahoga County, which previously funded the St. Vincent psychiatric ER. The psychiatric ER is housed inside the Behavioral Health Hospital, a $42 million project that opened two years ago to combat a local shortage in capacity for short-term behavioral inpatient care.
