There is a great need in the town of Walla Walla Washington. Currently there is only one psychiatrist running an outpatient center in the town. If this didn't already make it hard to get help if you needed it then the fact that no area hospitals have inpatient psychiatric care just makes things worse.
The problem with not having enough care facilities for the mentally ill is that they need help and when they try and seek it they just get shipped off to far away towns, sometimes as far as Seattle or Portland. This move could be damaging for the patients who need to be around their friends and family.
Since the building of a inpatient facility would be costly the town decided to creat a Crisis Response team to help with the proccess of taking care of the ill. This team is composed of a group of notable health officials in the community who meet and decide where to send mentally ill patients who check into hospitals to recieve care.
This crisis team does a good job but I feel that not enough is being done to help the mentally ill. I propose the forming of another crisis team known as a Rapid Response Team. These teams are comprised of about fifteen to twenty nurses and social workers who work on call to help provide care at hospital emergency rooms for mentally ill patients. These teams help to relieve hospital doctors and nurses from the arduous task of caring for mentally ill patients. In cities across the nation who formed these rapid response teams they have seen dramatic drops in repeate emergency department visits and even claim that the teams save them around 1.8 million dollars.
By getting the word out we can help local officials to realize that the forming of a rapid response team isn't just a good idea, its the only one we've got.
