Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Hendersonville News re: Mental Health Patients

Hendersonville News

Local sheriff's deputies can spend hours handling involuntary committals instead of patrolling the streets. The time-consuming process can create problems for law enforcement, hospitals, people who suffer mental illness and the community. This issue and more will be explored in an upcoming meeting hosted by the Four Seasons chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. The meeting is at 11:30 a.m. Saturday at the Pardee Education Center in the Blue Ridge Mall. The public is invited. "This is an information session to inform people of the need for a crisis intervention team and what it is so that we can hopefully get it started," said Nancy Moreland, the education program chair for Four Seasons NAMI.Crisis intervention teams are community collaborations between mental health providers, law enforcement officers and consumer advocates. The teams are geared toward improving the outcomes of law enforcement interaction with people with mental illness. The meeting will include members of Four Seasons NAMI, the Henderson County Sheriff's Office and the Western North Carolina and Wake County chapters of NAMI.

For more on this story, read Thursday's Times-News

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http://wral.com/news/local/video/2740481/

http://wunc.org/programs/news/archive/NRH041608MNTL_HEALTH.mp3/view


DISCHARGED PATIENTS:North Carolina risks lives and violates federal rules by discharging patients from its state mental hospitals without adequate plans for community care, the advocacy group Disability Rights North Carolina said Tuesday. A report by the group focused on the deaths of three people within two weeks of their discharges from state hospitals last year. Executive Director Vicki Smith said the group's investigation found a "pattern of dangerously inadequate discharge planning practices" and a system "rife with ambiguity and without accountability." Poor planning for community care leads to increased hospital use by patients who return over and over, and it leads to deaths, Smith said.
One of the patients focused on in the report, Drew Thames, who had twice attempted suicide, was discharged in November from John Umstead Hospital in Butner after a five-day stay. The 16-year-old boy slipped away from his Orange County home in December and was later found dead in a Wilmington hotel. Another patient, Bryan Lowery, was sent from Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh to a homeless shelter that had been shut down two days before his discharge. He died in a motel room of an overdose two days before he was to check into a drug treatment center. And another patient, who wasn't identified by name in the group's report, bought a gun the day after his Aug. 1 release from Broughton Hospital in Morganton and shot himself in the head Aug. 3. A recent News & Observer report identified him as Carl Wayne Tournear of Mooresville.
James Osberg, the Department of Health and Human Services administrator who oversees state institutions, said patients are not discharged before doctors determine they are no longer a danger to themselves or others. Discharge plans vary in quality, he said. He would not comment on the cases Disability Rights identified, but he said it would be wrong to assume that an inadequate discharge plan resulted in a death. Hospitals don't have time to do thorough discharge plans for most patients in the hospitals only a few days, he said. And in some cases, Osberg said, community services that patients need are not available.
(Lynn Bonner, THE NEWS & OBSERVER, 4/16/08).

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