LUTZ, Fla. — In America, one in five adults lives with mental illness. That's 57.8 million people, to be exact, according to the National Institute of Health.
Doctors at St. Joseph's Hospital-North said many of those people also have medical conditions like COPD, high blood pressure, and cancer.
"Right now in our emergency room we have patients with medical needs and psychiatric needs," Sara Dodds, the interim president at St. Joseph's Hospital-North, said. "We delay treatment because there's nowhere for them to go."
St. Joseph's doctors believe they found the solution with their new Unit for Psychiatry and medical services or UPM. They said it's the first of it's kind in the country.
"Let's deal with their mental health issue and their medical at the same time," Gail Ryder, director of behavioral health, said. "Let's get them better together. So what we built here is a sensitivity to someone with mental illness and their medication condition."
The unit will have 24 beds and will be fully staffed with doctors, nurses, and therapists working together to help patients with all of their needs at one time.
"Once our patients are medically cleared within the St. Joseph's North emergency department, they come up to here to the intake area for continued evaluation and assessment," said Director of inpatient services Anthony Santucci.
Patients will be in rooms with first of its kind psychiatric medical beds. Unlike traditional hospital beds, these beds are made specifically so patients can't harm themselves. For example, there are no holes in the bedrails, so patients can't tie things around them. All of the equipment, like oxygen tanks and medication for medical IVs, will be behind locked walls. They will only be allowed to be unlocked by staff. The rooms also won't have regular bathroom doors.
"In the spirit of re-imagining care delivery, by taking a traditional door away from this space, what you have now is the Maintenance of privacy," Santucci said. "But then, what you also have, if a patient tries to put pressure on top of the door, it will collapse, and it won't allow a ligature point."
All of the rooms are outfitted with Alexa. And, if the therapist can't come to the patient, they can get them on the TVs in the rooms. All of the rooms have Bluetooth accessibility for privacy for the rooms with two beds in them. Santucci said they got a lot of these ideas from the pandemic.
"There were a lot of positive things for us to learn from that experience and that was one of them," said Santuci.
All of the rooms are monitored around the clock to make sure patients don't hurt themselves.
"We're really pushing that edge in terms of technology as well as a new age of looking at delivering medicine and that's what we're here for," Chief Medical Officer Christopher Bucciarelli said. "There's a need from the community and we're rising to that occasion."
The unit will officially open on April 17.
