Are psych units closing in your area?

Nurses General Nursing

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Specializes in Med/Surg.

I'm a float nurse and psych is my favorite unit. I was hoping to transfer there full time but they are closing the unit. I'm so disappointed. They also closed the psych unit of a neighboring med-surg hospital. Is this true in your area? My dream of working in mental health is looking bleak.

Specializes in Critical Care.

In my area (coastal CA) we only have one 16-bed inpatient psych unit run by the county as its own facility.

None of our hospitals have dedicated inpatient psych units, and it's a huge problem imo. We see patients all the time who could benefit from a psych consult at the very least, but the vast majority are medically cleared and discharged without having their psych issues addressed in any meaningful way.

Specializes in mental health / psychiatic nursing.

In my area several in-patient psych units at different hospitals are being consolidated into a single free-standing psych hospital. Supposedly it is to increase access to care and reduce ED wait time for individuals seeking in-patient psych treatment. However the creation of this new facility and closure of the old in-patients units is reducing the total number of psych beds in the county. We'll see how effective the new facility is - it does seem like a lot of thought went into the design and there are a lot of reasons to be excited about it, but the reduction in beds does have me a little hesitant to be fully behind it.

As a nursing student who wants to work in psych when I graduate, my chances of getting an in-patient job got a lot lower with this move. Each of the old units would take at least couple new grads every year, but I can't see this new facility being able to absorb and train more than a handful of new grads a year if that.

Trying to get myself some community mental health program contacts now and build skills that will be useful in out-patient and community based settings.

I'm a float nurse and psych is my favorite unit. I was hoping to transfer there full time but they are closing the unit. I'm so disappointed. They also closed the psych unit of a neighboring med-surg hospital. Is this true in your area? My dream of working in mental health is looking bleak.

I work psych and med/surg (alternately) in the same hospital. The inpatient psych unit is not closing, but it is changing to geri-psych (at some point) which sounds a lot like med/surg to me.

The outpatient program affiliated with the hospital recently closed down, entirely.

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