Here’s yet one more casualty story of budget cutting. It just makes one wonder where in the world people are seeing value when you also read a couple days ago about NASDAQ going to spend $700 million on a system to allow faster trades on the stock market. I would rather see people taken care of properly rather than this need for speed financial disease that keeps spreading. The numbers showed that one patient a day is bused out of the city to another state. California doesn’t do this but has received over 200 patients that have been bused in from Nevada. The numbers of patients being bused in Nevada is in question as it is much higher than the norm, if there is one.
Placing a patient on a bus who is not able to take care of themselves is certainly not a way to treat mental illness and granted the degree of illness can be evaluated but a couple patients were found to be delirious and have no clue where they are. Another business decision here? BD
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Nevada's primary state psychiatric hospital has transported more than 1,500 mentally ill patients to cities across the nation by Greyhound bus over the last five years, according to a published story.
As Nevada has slashed funding for mental health services, the number of such patients being bused out of Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas climbed 66 percent from 2009 to 2012, The Sacramento Bee reported Sunday (http://bit.ly/15cz8Bn ).
"Discharging severely mentally ill patients inappropriately is policy in this country," Jaffee told the Bee. "But getting rid of them altogether by busing them out of state is, I think, rare. I am shocked by these figures. It seems to be almost routine in Nevada."
Los Angeles County officials said they have not bused a single patient out of state during the past year, and when they have done so in the past they have supplied chaperones. The county has received 213 people from the Nevada hospital in the last five years, more than any place in the country.
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