WMUR – December 6, 2024
By JON SCHOENHEIDER
MANCHESTER, N.H. — The New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services said there are now no adults waiting for inpatient psychiatric care in the state, beating the original goal to end the emergency department boarding process by 2025. DHHS and the National Alliance on Mental Illness first launched what they call ‘Mission Zero’ in September 2023. While the initiative started over a year ago, they said the goal was in the works for more than a decade, focusing efforts for 11 years. The last time hospitals achieved total clearance was during the pandemic in 2020.
“For most of the folks that we hear from, their stories are about boarding in the emergency department and, for a long time in really, sometimes traumatizing circumstances,” said NAMI New Hampshire Executive Director Susan Stearns. Stearns said before today, it could take days or even weeks for patients in crisis to get the proper care they required, while being held in separate hospital rooms until someone could attend to them. Those patients worked with advocates leading Mission Zero to make them aware of the need for change, and the difficult circumstances they found themselves in with no say in what was happening. Mission Zero began after a federal judge ordered the state to stop holding patients for long periods of time against their will in 2023. The two are not related.
Dr. Fuad Khan, Senior Medical Director of Behavioral and Community Health and Wentworth-Douglass Hospital, was part of Mission Zero’s early strategic development. He said the project succeeded the most through strong communication on all fronts, when groups shared the burden of rising patient numbers hospitals across the country continue to witness for psychiatric cases.
“Everybody pitched in, everybody put all their cards on the table, everybody spoke the same language, and everybody contributed to say, ‘Oh, yes, I have a place,'” he said.
The collaborative effort is one Stearns said can teach a lesson to other agencies statewide to resolve their own respective issues. “I think it really speaks to how we can do really hard things when we work together,” she said. “I think it’s a model our state could use to tackle other hard issues.” NAMI said they’re optimistic about what this means for collaboration across state agencies on other issues. But Dr. Khan notes hospitals still need to change to meet mental health demand going forward, mainly growing continually shrinking resources in the national healthcare sector.
“We need to build early intervention models extremely effectively because depending on a very highly functional emergency room, it’s still a failure of the total overall system,” Khan said.
NAMI adds they’re aware of the needs of three adults in correctional facilities and 11 children who require care in New Hampshire, adding they’re going to continue to address all patients requiring involuntary psychiatric attention regardless of age.