Dr. Gabbe shares his experience of touring the new Clinical Decision Unit in the Emergency Department.
Hi! This month we are opening the Clinical Decision Unit or CDU in the Emergency Department at University Hospital. Pete Geier and I toured it recently. This is a beautiful new facility and I’d like to congratulate and thank Janet Susi RN, Tammy Moore RN, as well as Jay Kasey and Drs. Doug Rund and Mark Mosely for making our plans a reality.
But more than being beautiful, this new unit has the potential to really help us serve our Emergency Department patients better and get patients who need to be admitted in to beds sooner. With 20 beds, the CDU will serve as an area where the ED physicians and staff can monitor patients on an outpatient basis for an extended period of time before admitting or releasing them. This will free up rooms in the ED, which should minimize patient wait times in this area.
One of the beneficial effects of this new unit is the opportunity to convert some of the previous, 6-bed CDU space into a multi-bed dedicated psychiatric unit to better serve our psychiatric patients who come in through the ED. This new area will take about 18 months to complete.
The reason we have this need in our ED is that the community mental health system is just not large enough to service the community’s mental health needs, especially in the evenings and on weekends. Therefore, one of the only options people with mental illness have during these difficult times is our Emergency Department.
We have been able to improve the experience in the ED for our mental health patients recently by improving collaboration between public and private institutions in Columbus to get patients to the right treatment setting in a more timely fashion.
This collaboration doesn’t stop with ED visits. Our OSU/Harding leadership team talks with other providers in the community EVERY morning to assess demand for beds and availability of beds across the community.
Did you know that our OSU/Harding facility is the most comprehensive provider of psychiatric services in the area? With 48 adult inpatient beds and 20 child/adolescent beds, as well as a unique partial hospitalization program that sees about 20 patients a day, and an outpatient clinic with over 25,000 annual visits, OSU/Harding provides services to adults, adolescents and children who have a psychiatric disease. Still the need is greater than the services available.
Dr. Radu Saveanu, Chair of Psychiatry and Executive Director of Harding Hospital, is working with representatives from the other mental health providers to increase collaboration and communication across providers and create more access on the evenings and weekends as well as evaluate the possibility of a shared electronic medical record to coordinate care for our most challenging patients. With decreased state and local funding to community agencies, the hospital systems are anticipating an even greater demand for psychiatric services.
Caring for patients with mental illness is just another example of how central Ohio’s hospitals are working together to solve community health issues.
I hope this spirit of collaboration will continue in the mental health care community. It serves as an excellent model for the improvement of health care for our citizens throughout the region.
Well, have a great week.