• Pediatric Mental Health Emergencies in the ED
• Adult Psychiatric Emergencies policy statement
• ACEP Well-Being Resource Guide

ACEP is working closely with many partner organizations, including the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, the American Association for Emergency Psychiatry, the National Alliance on Mental Illness and more to assure that recommendations and solutions align with our on-going efforts in the area of emergent behavioral health care.

Thoughts from ACEP President Christopher S. Kang, MD, FACEP

Dr. Kang

The COVID-19 pandemic has indelibly disrupted our individual lives, local and national communities, and clinical practices. Throughout it all, emergency departments, staffed by you and your teams, remained open and steadfast. However, emergency medicine cannot continue to shoulder most of the health care system as various inadequacies persist and grow. Mental health patients have increasingly complex needs, fewer places for support, and board longer in the ED than medical patients. Left unaddressed, mental health care for patients and ourselves will challenge, even threaten, our security and humanity as well as the future well-being and trajectory of our workforce and specialty. Your individual and collective participation and collaboration are essential. And it starts with your willingness to learn and do more at the bedside and in your hospitals and sharing your stories, innovations, and successes.

Note: If you’re involved in significant innovations to address emergency mental health care, ACEP’s EM Practice Committee would love to learn more and highlight successful models. If you are willing to be featured, please send an email to sshahid@acep.org with a brief description.

Listen in: Dr. Kang will talk about behavioral health and physician mental health as our guest on the May episode of ACEP Nowcast.

It’s also important to recognize the tools that exist in our communities of care; several are as close as a simple keystroke. Many EM clinicians across the country recognize the power of existing community information exchanges such as FindHelp and UniteUs that can provide lists of available community resources such homeless shelters, behavioral health treatment centers, sobering centers and substance use disorder organizations, amongst other things. Access to relevant information on these platforms is often free of any charge, is easily available to the general public, is targeted by zip codes, and provides a wealth of information on available resources such as hours of operation, contact information, and resource website access.

Many of the individuals for whom we provide emergency mental health care have ongoing issues. In many cases, these individuals are connected with a number of additional practitioners within our communities of care, and if not, they probably should be. It’s easy to focus on the resources that we lack for ideal treatment, such as immediate psychiatric consultations or immediate housing placement. It’s worth the effort to recognize what resources of care exist within each of our communities and extend an outreach to understand them better and to proactively create plans of action together.