Since the start of 2022 the community mental health system has witnessed the roll out of a dramatic reorganization of emergency services by the State of New Hampshire about which few patients and healthcare providers had any foreknowledge. A key component of this change in service delivery has been the establishment of the 24/7 “Access Point” a call center located in multiple states across the country but with no apparent site in New Hampshire. This radical restructuring is designed to field all urgent calls from inactive, established and prospective community mental health center patients, significant others and healthcare providers in the State of New Hampshire, a role that for decades had been the responsibility of in-center emergency services teams.
This model has ended the personalized involvement of local Emergency Services clinicians as first responders to patients in crisis. It has also rendered these and other health care providers dependent on the clinical decision-making of an anonymous and ever changing cadre of clinicians scattered across the United States who have no working knowledge of the caller or understanding of local care resources. This shift in how mental health emergencies are addressed has placed an unnecessary and burdensome layer of bureaucracy between patients and emergency services clinicians. Patients, their family and healthcare providers need to speak up quickly and forcefully about this patently “wrong turn” in the delivery of timely and empathic emergency mental health care to the residents of New Hampshire
Jerrold Pollak
Portsmouth