New Orleans Continues To Experience Shortage Of Psychiatric Beds

February 23, 2008 – 7:20 am | posted in Psychology / Psychiatry

New Orleans continues to struggle to meet the needs of mentally ill residents more than two years after Hurricane Katrina severely damaged the city’s largest mental health care facility at Charity Hospital, the AP/Houston Chronicle reports. The closure of Charity Hospital, which had 300 beds for mentally ill patients, has resulted in police taking residents with mental illnesses to hospital emergency departments for care.

Cecil Tebo, administrator of the police department’s crisis unit, said, “It’s a bad situation for everyone,” adding, “There aren’t beds for people and hospitals are discharging them before people are stable enough to live in the community.” Tebo said the police department receives as many as 10 calls per month to deal with homicidal or suicidal individuals, or those with severe mental disabilities (Foster, AP/Houston Chronicle, 2/19).

State data showed that there currently are 225 inpatient psychiatric beds at nine sites in the city, down from pre-Katrina levels of 507 beds at 17 sites, while a 2006 survey found that as many as 80% of the city’s psychiatrists had left the area after the 2005 hurricane (Pope, New Orleans Times-Picayune, 2/20).

The city’s hospitals are not operating at capacity, and Orleans Parish Prison has become the city’s largest acute-care mental health facility with 60 beds allocated for psychiatric use, according to the AP/Chronicle (AP/Houston Chronicle, 2/19). Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals Secretary Alan Levine on Tuesday said that the New Orleans Adolescent Hospital has added 10 beds to its psychiatric unit and will add 10 more once personnel has been hired. The additional beds increase the number of psychiatric beds at the facility to 55 — 40 for adults and 15 for children and teenagers.

Within a month, Levine said he expects to announce that 20 additional local beds will be available in portable buildings near University Hospital. “The number of beds is slowly working its way back up to pre-Katrina levels,” Levine said (New Orleans Times-Picayune, 2/20).

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