The Hennepin County Medical Center Program in Medical Psychiatry: Addressing the Shortened Lifespan of Patients with Mental Illness

Excerpt

It was early 2011. We had just concluded a program in which hospitalists were assigned to the Psychiatry inpatient service at Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC). It was a dismal failure. The psychiatry wards, without oxygen in the walls, IVs in the rooms, or tourniquets for blood drawing, were not designed to provide medical care. Meanwhile, the outpatient psychiatric Day Treatment patients needed primary care, as the patients would not travel across campus to the unfamiliar Medicine Clinic. We then had a large influx of chronically ill poor patients with psychiatric and medical illness, brought to HCMC as part of a statewide change in insurance coverage. The Medicine Clinic was not prepared to provide mental health services for these complex patients. Finally, on the Medicine Inpatient Service, there were frequent transfers to Psychiatry of medical patients after the medical illness was stabilized; but once transferred, the medical problems often became hard to manage and the patients were sent back to Medicine. All was not right with medical psychiatric care at HCMC. …