I keep reading about your loved ones, at times, being in the hospital for weeks/months. I’m guessing you are not in the US. I don’t believe we in the States allow people to stay that long. Please enlighten me.
Thank you,
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My son has had a couple of lengthy stays, and I now marvel at how they happened. I think my son presented so sick at those times, that he still met inpatient criteria. In those cases he was on involuntary hold, which the hospital doctors had to petition for.
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@Vallpen Are you in the States? My son has not been hospitalized. He probably should have been last year but we didn’t know what was going on.
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We’ve been able to get month-long hospitalizations. We live in MA and we have BCBS as primary and Medicaid as secondary. Fortunately, I think the involuntary hold criteria in MA is a bit more lenient than in some other states because “danger to self” includes the inability to care for self, not just showing suicidal tendencies. We’ve been lucky. So far, our child has been able to get what he needs, when he needs it.
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My daughter, in the UK, recently had a 4 month stay in hospital to recover from a relapse. Would that happen in the US?
This is only a thought. Are the length of hospital stays in the US linked to how much you can pay, either from a payout by an insurance that you pay premiums to, or from funding the hospital gets from government, or perhaps the length of stay is for some other reason?
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I think there’s definitely a correlation to money in the states. Until the US government takes steps to regulate the costs of medical services and medications, they will continue to rise. And care will continue to suffer as a result.
I have seen this first-hand multiple times. My daughter had three ER visits for loss of consciousness. They did NOTHING for her but give her fluids and send her home each time. It wasn’t until I demanded an inpatient stay and they did more lab work inpatient that I learned she had gastroenteritis, which is an inflammation of the stomach lining. We suspect it could be due to her meds but can’t confirm that yet. Meanwhile, I wait for my otherwise physically healthy child to get sicker. I wait to put her into a residential program. I wait for insurance to approve her admission. I wait to have to fight for her care, yet again.
The US medical system is broken, but it’s the best and only thing we have right now. And people are working to improve it. Maybe one day it will be better.
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Over here in the UK we’re lead to believe that you had a man (Obama) who had a bit of a tinker with it and seemed to have made an improvement, and now you’ve got someone (Trump) who’s going to undo all that tinkering. Then he’ll probably hit it with a big hammer, and then he’ll tweet that it’s all fixed. You’ve got Trump, we’ve got Brexit, where are the Jedi when you need them.
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Ahh, believe me, a tinker wouldn’t do a bit of good with the size of the problem. Just would look good in the news. President Obama once referred to the mentally ill as “crazies” in a televised moment I actually witnessed. Nothing secondhand here. At the time I thought, everyone else is protected from names but our loved ones.
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Search on mentally ill woman, baltimore to see what a hospital did recently. Luckily someone nearby witnessed the event. Let’s hope this news story grows and grows, her mom is trying.
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@shop1uk Yes we did have a man who was taking us in the right direction and now we have one trying to set us back a hundred years. Hopefully, we’ll climb out of this mess soon!
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Now this made me smile - if we go back about a 100 years will we be closer to the time of residential brain disease care?
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We are in the US. His hospital stays were longer when he was in the behavioral health facility connected with the main public hospital in our city. I think the doctors there are more comfortable going to court and getting court-ordered stays.
Insurance companies can override doctor recommendations for people to stay in the hospital. This happened to our family member during psychosis, stayed three weeks. Doctors wanted more, but insurance company is in charge, unless, I guess, a family is ultra-super rich and can afford to pay.
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length of hospital stays in the usa are different from state to state. Some are great and some are terrible.
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Obama made some good improvements, ended some systemic abuses against people with pre existing conditions, and closed some loopholes. Unfortunately insurance companies then used that as an opportunity (excuse) to jack the rates up enormously. We saw 50% increases in premiums in on year alone along with 50% more people insured. Insurance companies are showing higher profits across the board now.
As for Trump, he is a giant buffoon and the hands down worst thing to ever happen to this country. His xenophobia and paranoia alone have returned us to the cold war era and divided the world. He has ripped families apart, and created chaos in every area of our country. My husband believes he is the catalyst for change, I think he’s the catalyst for ruin. World War III would not surprise me at this point. The man scares me. Thank goodness for our constitution or he would be a dictator.
A Jedi would be great! Bring on the lightsabers!
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Here in sunny New Jersey, the only long term stays are in the state mental institutions. My husband has been in twice when he was really bad and stayed a little over 2 months…still wasn’t long enough! The short term facilities are 7 to 10 day stays… definitely not long enough…these are the places that “treat them and street them”
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