Before the pandemic, when child psychiatrist Abbie Donovan would head down to see young patients stuck in the hospital emergency department for lack of a psychiatric bed, she would find just a couple, and knew their limbo would last just a day or so.
“But what we are seeing now is completely unprecedented,” said Donovan, associate director of the Acute Psychiatry Service at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In emergency departments across the country, “we are all coping with astronomical need for care that we’re unable to address right now, even though we’re desperately trying to.”
At one point this spring, she counted 17 stuck pediatric patients. “We no longer measure length of stay in hours,” she said. “I have children who are stuck with us not for three, four, five days,” Donovan said, “but for weeks.”
