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This is a practice going on for years. Hospitals dumps a patient to the streets rather than keeping them or connecting them with needed social services.
Eventually, a patient with no means of paying for services rendered will have to go. It's simple economics. Their families should take responsibility and quit expecting Uncle Sugar to solve everything. The end.
People need to pay for their own stuff and not rely on others.
If they don’t have the money, not my problem nor society’s problem.
Everything to you is about you and your pennies. There are far better ways to deal with the 'patient dumping' than how they did it Baltimore, and it doesn't have to hurt your precious money at all.
Patient dumping *is* a disgusting practice and what happened to this woman was a real travesty.
That said - hospitals every day are confronted with a big problem of what to do with homeless/mentally ill/family-less patients upon discharge. There is no halfway house or other facility/people to release these patients to. They can't keep people admitted as patients just to provide them with shelter.
Nobody should be released into the cold night the way this woman was. Nobody. This event scratches the surface in another big problem however - the problem of discharging patients who have no home or family to assist them. Hospitals are not equipped to host these people indefinitely.
Eventually, a patient with no means of paying for services rendered will have to go. It's simple economics. Their families should take responsibility and quit expecting Uncle Sugar to solve everything. The end.
Sure. You think that mentally ill woman had a family with money?
Again, pushing people toward liberalism. Maybe you want to live under socialism. Keep it up then.
Patient dumping *is* a disgusting practice and what happened to this woman was a real travesty.
That said - hospitals every day are confronted with a big problem of what to do with homeless/mentally ill/family-less patients upon discharge. There is no halfway house or other facility/people to release these patients to. They can't keep people admitted as patients just to provide them with shelter.
Nobody should be released into the cold night the way this woman was. Nobody. This event scratches the surface in another big problem however - the problem of discharging patients who have no home or family to assist them. Hospitals are not equipped to host these people indefinitely.
Social services. A homeless shelter. Was a hospital social worker involved in this gross act? If the lady wants to leave the shelter that is her choice but a hospital cannot be allowed to do this.
Social services. A homeless shelter. Was a hospital social worker involved in this gross act? If the lady wants to leave the shelter that is her choice but a hospital cannot be allowed to do this.
I think it would be a good start to have 24-hour social services staff in every hospital that can serve as a patient advocate and direct them toward available services. That would be a huge help for many of these people. But there will always be people who either distrust the system, or for whatever reason don't want help. You cannot force it upon them unless they meet qualifications for an involuntary hospital hold.
Both America and England closed down the large mental hospitals decades ago. It was felt there were better ways of caring for the mentally ill. I personally, feel it was a mistake, but I understand the reasons it was done.
There are no votes in mental illness. It is the Cinderella service, underfunded here in England also. My sister has suffered with mental illness in the past, so I saw it close up.
The mental health service is part of the NHS. Patients are treated sympathetically, and looked after well. I saw the improvements made over many years here. Modern drugs have helped to control the symptoms, and many folks manage to live in society quite well.
I don't believe in molly coddling. I am not a Liberal shouting out for more and more money. But, I draw the line at putting a mentally ill person out on the streets semi naked. There is no defence for it, and no excuse. Just plain disgusting.
The mental health system in the US is a lottery and it often depends which state you reside in as to how you are cared for.
The irony is that those with severe mental illness can end up in the criminal justice and prison systems where it costs the US tax payer a lot more money to keep them than it would to just treat them in a hospital in the first place.
Closing down mental hospitals was a huge mistake. Some people are simply unfit to be out in the general public but our politicians thought otherwise, and were bolstered in part by well-meaning but unrealistic human rights activists on behalf of the mentally ill who fought for their right to live freely. Our politicians took that excuse and ran with it in order to scrap mental health care from budgets. And so now we have the mess that we do.
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