Hoping to keep more people with mental illness out of jails and emergency rooms, county health officials opened a mental health urgent care center Wednesday in South Los Angeles.
The goal of The Martin Luther King, Jr. Mental Health Urgent Care Center is to stabilize and treat people in immediate crisis while connecting them to ongoing care. Run by Exodus Recovery, it will be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week and can serve up to 16 adults and six adolescents. During their stay of up to one day, patients will undergo a psychiatric evaluation, receive on-the-spot care such as counseling and medication and be referred for longer-term treatment.
The center can take people in severe crisis and expects many will be brought in by police and paramedics, said Connie Dinh, vice president of nursing services for Exodus. But she said it cannot accept people who are incoherent, extremely aggressive or need emergency medical attention. They will still need to be treated at hospitals or inpatient psychiatric facilities.
Staff will be able to place people on 72-hour psychiatric holds if they are a danger to themselves or others.
Mental health urgent care centers, also known as crisis stabilization units, are opening throughout California in response to the shortage of psychiatric beds and the increase in patients with mental illnesses showing up at hospital emergency rooms with nowhere else to go,...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]
