OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANT DISORDER: Help Address the Crisis in Access to Acute Inpatient Care

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Help Address the Crisis in Access to Acute Inpatient Care

Help Address the Crisis in Access to Acute Inpatient Care

March 31, 2009

The new NAMI Grading the States 2009 report contains important new findings on the depth of the crisis in access to acute inpatient psychiatric care across the nation. Among the key findings in the NAMI report:

Nearly 127,000 inpatient beds have been lost since 2000 and more than 197,000 since 1990,
There are now fewer than 10.8 beds per 1,000 per adults living with serious mental illness, and
Only 11 states in NAMI's survey were able to share any type of data on how long it takes to get an inpatient psychiatric bed through an emergency room and 8 states were unable to report on the actual number of inpatient beds in their state.

Grading the States contains a number of policy recommendations to address this crisis in access to acute inpatient psychiatric care. Among these are addressing the Medicaid Institutions for Mental Disease (IMD) exclusion. This longstanding and discriminatory policy prohibits the use of federal Medicaid dollars for services for adults (ages 22-64) in psychiatric hospitals. The IMD exclusion serves as a barrier not only to reimbursing care in psychiatric hospitals, but also to implementing home and community-based waiver services that have been very helpful to other Medicaid populations such as people with developmental disabilities.

Click here to view a copy of NAMI's Grading the States 2009 report.

Act Now!

NAMI is supporting federal legislation to address the IMD exclusion with two specific bills now before Congress:

1) Complete repeal of the IMD exclusion (HR 619). Send a letter to your House member in support of HR 619 now!
2) Authorization of a demonstration program to lift the IMD exclusion for emergency psychiatric services (HR 1415). Send a letter to your House member in support of HR 1415 now!

Since these bills are moving on separate tracks, advocates are urged to send individual letters on both bills.

NAMI E-News Alerts are electronic newsletters provided free of charge as a public service. With more than 1,100 state and local affiliates, NAMI is the nation's largest grassroots organization dedicated to improving the lives of people with severe mental illnesses. Contributions to support our work can be made online.

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