Inpatient psychiatric room would cost $1 million
By PETER BOLTZ
Express Staff Writer
In wide-ranging press conference at St. Luke’s Wood
River Medical Center on Thursday, hospital administrator Jon Moses said an
"inpatient psychiatric" room would cost approximately $750,000
to $1 million a year.
Dr. Keith Sivertson, St. Luke’s
Wood River Medical Center director of emergency care, explains hospital
procedures during a press conference Thursday.
Moses was reluctant to use the term "crisis
bed," favored by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI),
because, he said, he doesn’t know "what a crisis bed in Idaho
means."
He said that in the "confusion that has raged for
months," terms like crisis bed and safe room have been used
interchangeably.
He added that in Idaho, the medical community doesn’t
even have a definition for crisis bed. In this state, he said, "we
have inpatient psychiatric rooms, and I am not sure NAMI wants inpatient
psychiatric rooms."
Tewa Evans, president of Wood River Valley chapter of NAMI,
called Moses’s cost figures "absurd."
John Moses, Hospital
administrator. Express photos by David Seelig
"He’s talking about providing a whole psychiatric
department and that’s not what we’re asking," Evans said.
Her estimates for renovating the hospital’s current safe
room were between $10,000 and $20,000.
If the hospital hired two psychiatric nurses, she said, it
would add another $120,000 in yearly salaries. To add a staff psychiatrist
would be another $150,000 a year.
Dr. Keith Sivertson, the hospital’s director of
emergency care, and Theresa Bush, director of nursing services, were also
at the interview.
Sivertson said the cost for an inpatient psychiatric room
was exclusive of licensing costs, building/environment costs and staff
costs. He estimated that 2 percent of the patients the hospital sees would
need such a room.
Moses and Sivertson acknowledge the hospital doesn’t
provide the care needed by those with psychiatric problems. But they also
note the hospital is not set up to handle severe heart problems, severe
burns nor neonatal intensive care.
No hospital can provide for every medical specialty,
Sivertson said, not even Johns Hopkins Hospital, where Sivertson was once
in charge of emergency services.
Johns Hopkins doesn’t have a burn unit, he said, and to
drive home the point, he said there isn’t a burn unit in all of Idaho.
"Some people see this as a failure," Sivertson
said, "that we have some things we can’t take care of and so we
must transfer patients to other facilities.
"We do no one a service by delivering a service
poorly when it can be done better elsewhere."
Referring to the difficulty of responding to the
"severe oversimplification" of the problem of care for the
mentally ill, Sivertson said, "Sometimes, from reading the newspaper
or listening to the radio, I think this [the hospital] must be the home of
Darth Vader. But we’re your neighbors."