Lisa put a spotlight on a little known crisis in Connecticut: hundreds of children with mental health issues have spent multiple nights in hospital emergency departments because they have no other place to go for treatment. She reported that these children were projected to spend more than 3,000 nights in the ED in 2014 — some children staying as many as 10 nights in the ED, receiving no treatment, just monitoring. She found hospitals were overwhelmed and ’’busting at the seams’’ with the number of children seeking treatment for mental health issues. In 2010, only 40 children had long stays in the emergency department compared to 250 in the first six months of 2014. The situation is compounded by the fact that the state is experiencing an acute shortage of inpatient and outpatient programs and, at the same time, has set goals to reduce the length of stays in residential treatment centers while not adequately providing the services to support the policy shift to home-based care.
