New numbers highlight Covid-19's impact on inpatient mental health care and emergency departments
New numbers reported this week suggest that inpatient psychiatric care capacity in Vermont slowly started to rebound last year, but still remains significantly below pre-pandemic levels.
Meanwhile, the total number of days that patients seeking mental health care spent in emergency departments statewide reached new heights. That number, over 10,500 days, now appears to be more than triple what a similar analysis found as a baseline in 2015.
That result is not surprising to Ben Smith, medical director of the emergency department at Central Vermont Medical Center in Berlin. His department’s internal numbers show at least a doubling of inpatient days waiting for crisis mental health care over the last five years. The impacts on patients of all kinds seeking care and on his staff are profound, he said.