Billings Clinic aiming to get psych patients out of emergency rooms
All too often, patients in psychiatric crisis end up in a hospital emergency room where they have to wait sometimes for hours to receive care.
Once there, they get checked out by doctors and nurses and often wait to either receive treatment, sometimes resulting in admission to psychiatric department, or get discharged to go home.
With that in mind, Billings Clinic announced Monday that its Clinic Classic fundraiser would go toward expanding its psychiatric department while building a new psychiatric stabilization evaluation unit that would get patients out of the emergency department and in front of psychiatric health workers who can better meet their needs.
“We would have a psychiatric emergency service that is designed for psychiatric patients instead of jamming those patients into a medical room in the emergency department,” said Dr. Eric Arzubi, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and chair of Billings Clinic’s psychiatric department.
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