OZH MENTAL HEALTH
Emergency Response
BY DWAIN HEBDA | PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAMES MOORE O
zarks Healthcare has long prided itself on providing advanced behavioral care, far
exceeding that of hospitals its size. And now, the health system is set- ting the bar even higher with the estab- lishment of a mental health emergency department, giving people in crisis an- other avenue to seek help in the moment. “This is separate from the existing emer-
gency room, but it’s also going to work very closely in collaboration with the emergency department,” said Jac Crawford, director of behavioral health. “It will function much like a psychiatric emergency department.”
The new Crisis Stabilization Center will be located in Ozarks Healthcare's old neuroscience building. It will improve the speed of care patients in crisis receive, put- ting them in front of a behavioral health specialist from the moment they walk in. “The whole point of this new crisis sta- bilization center is to have a place where patients can go to receive psychiatric care, primarily,” Crawford said. “If somebody’s coming in because they’re having thoughts of wanting to hurt themselves, all of the healthcare professionals they encounter in the crisis stabilization center are behav- ioral health-focused and have behavioral health backgrounds.”
As with most hospitals and health sys- tems in the country, patients experiencing a mental health emergency commonly report to the regular emergency depart- ment for help. Crawford said while Ozarks Healthcare's emergency department pro- vides outstanding service for physical ail- ments, it wasn’t designed to treat patients thinking of harming themselves, having a psychotic episode and the like. “Somebody comes into the hospital for
Above: emergency from the emergency department’s patient load. Patients will be immediately triaged based on their psychiatric conditions.
36 | OZARKS HEALTHCARE | FALL/WINTER 2022
a broken bone, they go to the emergency department,” he said. “If somebody comes in because they’re depressed and they’re having thoughts of suicide, the most ap- propriate place for them to go is still the emergency room. As it stands right now, the emergency room isn’t necessarily set up to focus primarily on psychiatric patients. “This means patients are receiving the best care that we can provide, but they’re still not receiving the most appropriate and expeditious care possible in terms of behav- ioral health issues. When you end up going to the emergency room, you are triaged first based on your medical issue. If you are there for psychiatric care, you are automat- ically separated from the rest of the queue. The physicians who are asking evaluative questions have had psychiatric training, but it’s definitely not their specialty.” The new crisis stabilization center will siphon off patients experiencing a mental health emergency from the emergency de- partment’s patient load, providing special- ized care from individuals trained in the field of behavioral health. “We will immediately triage them based on their psychiatric condi- tions, and we will begin the process of
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