The St. Louis Regional Psychiatric Stabilization Center, known as PSC, offers inpatient crisis access service through transfer referrals from area hospital emergency departments. John Eiler, president of PSC, describes it as a nonprofit public/private corporation.
“The service that we are currently offering is inpatient acute psychiatric stabilization,” Eiler said.
On Tuesday, July 17, PSC learned the results of a recent Joint Commission review that it will recommend PSC for Medicare certification effective July 6 to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services and are eligible for their reimbursement, which will lead to expanded services.
Hospitals with emergency departments can refer anyone from their ER with a psychiatric complaint that they have accessed as needing an inpatient psych stay to PSC for admission evaluation. One thing that makes them a bit different is since PSC is a free-standing psychiatric unit, is does not have the medical specialties found at other hospitals. Patients it receives have already been medically screened.
PSC does have an onsite pharmacy, two psychiatrists (they are recruiting for a third psychiatrist), and three internal medicine docs, who do internal medicine rounds daily.
“One of the things that we think we can do well is to be able to provide an alternative for folks who are in a mental health crisis, but to provide an alternative to a community hospital’s emergency room to be able for them to get immediate care while they are in crisis,” Eiler said. “The reason we feel we can do that better is that we have specialized staff and mental health professionals here – social workers, mental health nurses, who can intervene with the patient, do an assessment that is really targeting mental health needs.
Those folks are typically not onsite at a typical emergency department.”
It opened earlier this year at 5351 Delmar in midtown to help fill the void left when the state of Missouri closed its acute care inpatient and outpatient facility known as Metropolitan Psychiatric Center, in 2010, at the same location.
“In the early fall, we hope to open our Crisis Access Service which will make our inpatient services available to the community,” Eiler said.
“We will be able to go from 16 beds to 25 beds.”
He said it will reduce wait times in area emergency departments for psych beds. With Medicare reimbursements in place, Eiler said PSC will gear up to accept persons in psychiatric crisis from area police departments and Emergency Medical Services.
“What we are really trying to do is to use EMS… the paramedics, the ambulance guys, to use them as well as police … to triage folks who appear to have psychiatric problems that need an immediate crisis response, but not to have a medical problem,” Eiler explained. “We would use these first responders in the community to triage patients who are in a psychiatric crisis to come to us rather than going to a community emergency department.”
Eiler said police departments have trained in crisis intervention to identify persons in mental health crisis.
PSC is funded through a variety of sources, including state, local, and federal. As part of the Affordable Care Act, Missouri was one of 11 states awarded grants of the Medical Emergency Psychiatric Demonstration Project of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. PSC is one of 28 hospitals in the nation and among three in Missouri that began receiving funding this month.
Missouri continues to operate a forensic psychiatric facility onsite for outpatient court evaluation services and forensic inpatient pre-trial restoration to competency services.
For more information regarding its services, visit www.stlpsc.org.
