Mental health treatment center plan worth considering

Southern Nevada had a mental health crisis before there was a mental health crisis. Before the mass shootings at Virginia Tech, a suburban Denver movie theater and Sandy Hook Elementary School. Before other states were cutting back their mental health services in response to the Great Recession. Before families in other cities were lamenting a lack of options for loved ones.

How bad was mental health care in Southern Nevada? A new state psychiatric hospital had been needed in Las Vegas for years before the 2003 Legislature finally approved more than $30 million for the project. And when the facility opened in 2006 with more than enough demand to fill its 86 beds, the state had to leave 39 beds empty because it couldn't hire enough staff amid a national shortage of psychiatrists and skilled nurses.

The mentally ill have been taking up space in Las Vegas Valley hospital emergency rooms for many years, often waiting days for psychiatric beds to become available. Huge numbers of them quickly wind up in the county's unofficial asylums: jails. More than 5,700 mentally ill inmates were held at the Clark County Detention Center in 2011. Crisis is the default setting for mental health care here.

The issue of mental illness treatment is back in the headlines because of last month's massacre in Connecticut, carried out by the deeply troubled Adam Lanza. But the local need for better treatment existed long before that shooting. So Nevada officials have proposed opening a 24-hour Las Vegas urgent care center for the mentally ill. The center will be presented to Gov. Brian Sandoval and the Legislature as a "special consideration" outside agency budget requests.

Officials envision the center drawing the mentally ill out of emergency rooms and jails, where no treatment is available, and providing speedier access to inpatient and outpatient psychiatric services. The single location, inside an existing psychiatric facility on Charleston Boulevard near Jones Boulevard, would allow officials to close at least one existing outpatient clinic. In addition, the plan would fund 40 beds in Washoe County and 20 beds in rural Nevada for mentally ill patients in transition.

Conditions in Southern Nevada emergency rooms have improved. Richard Whitley, administrator for the Nevada Division of Mental Health and Development Services, told the Review-Journal that 16 mentally ill patients were stuck in emergency room beds one day last month, down from a daily average of up to 100 several years ago. But the number of mentally ill Southern Nevadans who go untreated remains high. It's difficult to estimate just how much these people cost the public through frequent contact with police and emergency room staff. Whatever the amount, it's far too much and represents a great government inefficiency.

Lawmakers and Gov. Sandoval should give serious consideration to the urgent care center proposal, which would cost about $7.5 million over two years. If it succeeds in making emergency rooms less crowded and reducing the state's inmate population, it has the potential to perform the rarest of public-sector feats: saving taxpayer money.