Hospitals and communities
It’s axiomatic to say that a better approach to mental health would be based around prevention and early intervention, rather than the less crisis-oriented system we have now. Some efforts are being made in that direction, and they involve, and require, outreach outside the hospital.
“The best hospitals doing work in mental health are going beyond the hospital walls; they’re really looking at their community,” Dr. Nguyen said. “You have hospitals, like Accountable Care Organizations, who are trying to move earlier and think about mental health from a pediatric standpoint: How can we support parents and children during critical phases of brain growth? How can we provide prevention services?” Ultimately, those efforts should help lower future admission rates to EDs and hospitals.
That forward-looking approach may be necessary, but it’s also a challenge. “As a hospital administrator, I would think that you look out at the community and see this problem is not going away – in fact, it is likely going to get worse,” Dr. McHugh said. “A health system may look at themselves and say we have to take the lead on this.” The difficulty is that thinking of it in a sense of value to the community, and making the requisite investments, will have a very long period of payout; a health system that’s struggling may not be able to do it. “It’s the large [health systems] that tend to be more integrated … that are thinking about this much differently,” he said.
Still, the reality is that’s where the root of the problem lies, Dr. Rylander said – not in the hospital, but in the larger community. “In the absence of very basic needs – stable housing, food, heating – it’s really not reasonable to expect that people are going to take care of their physical needs,” she said. “It’s a much larger social issue: how to get resources so that these people can have stable places to live, they can get to and from appointments, that type of thing.”
Those needs are ongoing, of course. Many of these patients suffer from chronic conditions, meaning people will continue to need services and support, said Ron Honberg, JD, senior policy adviser for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Often, people need services from different systems. “There are complexities in terms of navigating those systems and getting those systems to work well together. Until we make inroads in solving those things, or at least improving those things, the burdens are going to fall on the providers of last resort, and that includes hospitals,” he said.
Ron Honberg
A collaborative effort may be needed, but hospitals can still be active participants and even leaders.
“If hospitals really want to address these problems, they need to be part of the discussions taking place in communities among the various systems and providers and advocates,” Mr. Honberg said. “Ultimately, we need to develop a better community-based system of care, and a better way of handing people off from inpatient to community-based treatment, and some accountability in terms of requiring that people get services, so they don’t get rehospitalized quickly. You’re increasingly seeing accountability now with other health conditions; we’re measuring things in Medicare like rehospitalization rates and the like. We need to be doing that with mental health treatment as well.”
What a hospitalist can do
One thing hospitalists might consider is starting that practice at their own hospitals, measuring, recording, and sharing that kind of information.
“Hospitalists should measure systematically, and in a very neutral manner, the total burden and frequency of the problem and report it consistently to management, along with their assessment that this impairs the quality of care and creates patient risk,” Dr. Parks said. That information can help hospitalists lobby for access to psychiatric personnel, be that in person or through telemedicine. “We don’t have to lay hands on you. There’s no excuse for any hospital not having a contract in place for on-demand consultation in the ER and on the floors.”
Track outcomes, too, Dr. Mandal suggests. With access to the right personnel, are you getting patients out of the ED faster? Are you having fewer negative outcomes while these patients are in the hospital, such as having to use restraints or get security involved? “Hopefully you can get some data in terms of how much money you’ve saved by decreasing the length of stays and decreasing inadvertent adverse effects because the patients weren’t receiving the proper care,” he said.
As this challenge seems likely to continue to grow, hospitalists might consider finding more training in mental health issues themselves so they are more comfortable handling these issues, Dr. Parks said. “The average mini-psych rotation from medical school is only 4 weeks,” he noted. “The ob.gyn. is at least 8 weeks and often 12 weeks, and if you don’t go into ob.gyn., you’re going to see a lot more mentally ill people through the rest of your practice, no matter what you do, than you are going to see pregnant women.”
Just starting these conversations – with patients, with colleagues, with family and friends – might be the most important change of all. “Even though nobody is above these issues afflicting them, this is still something that is not part of an open dialogue, and this is something that affects our own colleagues,” Dr. Mandal said. “I don’t know how many more trainees jumping out of windows it will take, or colleagues going through depression and feeling that it’s a sign of weakness to even talk about it.
“We need to create safe harbors within our own medical communities and acknowledge that we ourselves can be prone to this,” he said. “Perhaps by doing that, we will develop more empathy and become more comfortable, not just with ourselves and our colleagues but also helping these patients. People get overwhelmed and throw their hands up because it is just such a difficult issue. I don’t want people to give up, both from the medical community and our society as a whole – we can’t give up.”