A judge's intervention ordering a state facility to accept emergency patients is only symptomatic of a more serious problem. A Superior Court judge on Saturday ordered the state-run Eleanor Slater Hospital in Cranston to resume accepting emergency psychiatric patients, after the hospital had shut its doors to such patients last week. The state hospital's chief executive officer, Richard H. Freeman, said he intended to fight Judge Alice Gibney's temporary restraining order at a court hearing on May 8. For reasons that are not fully understood, the number of Rhode Island adults in need of hospital care for mental illness has soared, especially in the past four months. The shortage, McNulty said, is not in hospital beds but in the community and outpatient services that can prevent hospitalization.
Patients typically stay there for months or years.
These people stay under close observation for a day or so. In past years, these admissions were few and far between, and the hospital was able to handle them, Freeman said. Eleanor Slater had three emergency admissions in 1998, nine in 1999 and six in 2000. The last straw, Freeman said, was the weekend of April 21-23, when 10 emergency psychiatric patients were admitted. Our staff provided heroic caretaking to these folks.