COVID-19 information may also be found on the hospital Facebook Page. Please check back regularly for the most accurate information. The assessment of behavioral health needs may create new opportunities to deploy psychologists to strengthen outpatient services in ways that can ultimately prevent individuals from needing hospitalization.Butler County Health Care Center is actively responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. 1 in Lifespan’s East Greenwich ambulatory-care center.Ĭare New England is partnering with the Providence Center to develop a system of care for outpatient and inpatient psychiatric disorders that would involve psychologists more directly in patient care, Price says. A new urgent care center and outpatient psychiatry program was scheduled to open Nov. “We are seeing increased volume in our outpatient care units,” says Lifespan Senior Vice President for Psychiatry & Behavioral Health Richard J. But Lifespan’s Newport Hospital saw a 4.3 percent increase from 302 to 315 comparing the same time periods. 22, down 0.6 percent from 641 in the same period in 2013. Rhode Island Hospital, part of the Lifespan network, had 637 mental health admissions between Jan. “In order to do that, our staff is making sacrifices and really pitching in so that we can accomplish that. It requires a real serious commitment.” We’re not staffed at levels that assume we’re going to be treating an average daily census of 180,” Price says. “We’re working very hard to keep up from a staffing perspective. The hospital has continued to hire nurses and mental health workers for vacant float positions. Other factors in the increased demand for beds are cuts in state funding for outpatient mental health services and Butler’s improved coordination with general hospitals to more quickly move psychiatric patients who arrive in emergency departments at other hospitals in the state to its facility, Price says.īutler has not hired new staff to address the higher census, instead using its float staff and those looking for additional shifts. The average length of stay remains unchanged at around seven to eight days, with duration longer for geriatric patients, Price adds. These are pretty seriously ill people who now appear to be seeking treatment.” It’s not like the worried well are all of a sudden looking for help with career planning or minor adjustment issues. “What’s striking about that is that these individuals who are seeking treatment are very ill so they’re meeting hospital level criteria. “We do think that people are seeking treatment who previously simply weren’t seeking treatment,” Price says. It is unknown how many of those were among the 124,000 Rhode Islanders estimated without health insurance in a 2011 report by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. 1, 2013, and March 31, 2014, totaled more than 92,000, including 64,590 accepted into Medicaid. New enrollments through HealthSource R.I., the state’s health care exchange, during the first open-enrollment period between Oct. One factor behind the demand, Price says, is that more people have insurance through the Affordable Care Act. “It works pretty well as an overflow unit, because it’s small and we can use it as a place to keep people very briefly until we have a bed for them on one of the regular units, but it isn’t staffed in any kind of permanent way,” Price says. The unit is in Butler’s Delmonico building in space formerly occupied by the Child and Adolescent Intensive Treatment Unit.
In September, it was used on four weekdays and three weekend days. Even with a 26-bed addition completed last fall, the Care New England Health System hospital opened up a 10-bed Adult Inpatient Overflow unit on weekends only over the summer.
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