City Cuts Psychiatric Beds – Taking the “Public” Out of Public Health

General Hospital for the acutely mentally ill, and to transfer the funding to a community-based program to provide an alternative for people with mental illnesses before they need hospitalization. The program would be run by the Progress Foundation, which already provides a number of Acute Diversion Units (ADU) programs in the City.

This proposal comes in the context of a precipitous reduction in the number of acute psychiatric beds at San Francisco hospitals over the past few years, with the result that SFGH’s Psychiatric Emergency Service (PES) has been on diversion 30% of the time since December 2006. In October 2005, Sutter Health closed 40 locked psychiatric beds at St. Luke’s Hospital. Sutter has announced it will close 28 more psychiatric hospital beds in 2008.

When PES is on diversion, people who are put on a 5150 legal hold for being a danger to themselves or others are taken to any of the city’s medical emergency rooms – where they are treated alongside car accident victims and people who suffer from heart attacks and other medical emergencies. There is no specialty psychiatric care. Acutely mentally ill patients sometimes wait for days to get into PES or a hospital psychiatric unit.

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