The Smoky Mountain Center has plans to establish three mobile crisis teams, made up of psychiatrists and nurses, that will travel around the seven western counties so patients can get care locally rather than traveling to the Balsam Center in Haywood County.īefore, said Trantham, someone with mental illness in Murphy who needed help would have to travel all the way to the Balsam Center in order to be evaluated. Though the closure of the Balsam Center has been a blow to mental health care in WNC, there are some services coming online that could help improve care by making it more accessible. That would have helped alleviate the problem. Caring for drug and alcohol addicts who don’t get help can be a major drain on county services, Beale added.īefore the Balsam Center closed, it was actually in the process of expanding the detox services it offered, said Trantham. “The real need today, more than ever, is for detox,” said Beale. That means the state must provide a significant amount of money to subsidize an often expensive detox program, and there’s inadequate funding to do so, Trantham said.Īddictions to drugs like methamphetamine are a critical problem in western areas of the state, so the need for a detox facility here is great. “We’re all going to be struggling to get access to that,” Trantham said.ĭetox facilites are few and far between because they’re expensive to run, and 80 percent of individuals who use them don’t have insurance, said Trantham. ![]() The closure of the Center’s detox facility means there will be more competition for fewer places offering detox. “There is a tremendous need for it not just in our area, but across the whole state.” ![]() “The one thing that has been critical that the Center has provided is detox,” said Trantham. Now, there isn’t anywhere that offers detox in the western part of the state. Also gone is a place to take patients who need detox from drugs or alcohol, which the adult recovery unit provided. Only six beds are currently available for patients at the unit, though eventually it will house 16.Įxtra beds are only one service that’s been lost with the closure of the Balsam Center. Now, those in the far western counties must drive the additional distance to HRMC and hope the facility has an open bed. “When we had a patient, that’s the first place we took them,” said Macon County Commissioner Chairman Ronnie Beale, who sits on the board of the Smoky Mountain Center. “It’s not square one, but it’s definitely a setback,” said Trantham. Instead, the opening of the new unit has resulted in the opposite - a loss of bed space due to the lack of staff to run two facilities. Ironically, the psychiatric unit at HRMC was supposed to alleviate the critical shortage of beds for mental health patients that has plagued the state. ![]() “Some areas you can make do and come up with other ways to meet the need, but when you’re talking about a 24-hour unit (like that at HRMC), you have to have what you have to have to run it safely,” Trantham said. ![]() 12 to its adult recovery unit, which offers detox to adults with mental illness, and the crisis management unit, where patients come to be evaluated.ĭoug Trantham, director of services for the Smoky Mountain Center, justified the shift of nurses from the Balsam Center to the new hospital-based center. Such low staffing levels could have gotten the Balsam Center in trouble with healthcare inspectors.Īs a result, Balsam Center stopped admitting patients Dec. The diversion of staff to the HRMC unit left the Balsam Center with only half the staff it needed to operate safely. The Smoky Mountain Center succeeded in pulling together enough staff to run the unit - but only by stealing nurses from its existing psychiatric facility, the Balsam Center. The extraordinarily difficult struggle to find nurses licensed in psychiatric care has forced the state agency that oversees mental health care in Western North Carolina to discontinue crucial services for its most critical patients.įor months, the Smoky Mountain Center for Mental Health has tried desperately to lure psychiatric nurses to help staff the new inpatient psychiatric wing at Haywood Regional Medical Center, which opened in October.
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