From KXAN:
“The average number of people stuck in jail waiting for a state hospital bed – a stubborn problem that Texas’ leaders have spent years and billions of dollars to fix – has fallen but could be plateauing, according to a state hospital expert, state data and a recent legislatively mandated report from Texas Health and Human Services.
… ‘It would be impossible to say that the wait list is not improving since their high in December of 2022, but I also know that it’s now kind of become stagnant,’ said Beth Mitchell, a supervising attorney with Disability Rights Texas. ‘If you look at just this year from January until now … the wait list hasn’t moved much at all.’
…Mitchell said the length of time people are waiting is a more pressing issue than the number of people waiting.
The waitlist could have triple the number of people on it, Mitchell said, but if the state were able to move them to a hospital in a timely manner there wouldn’t be an issue. Disability Rights’ lawsuit suggests 21 days as a benchmark for getting people to a hospital.
… ‘We expanded our inpatient psychiatric bed capacity in Mental Health Community Hospitals by maintaining the existing capacity and adding 193 state purchased inpatient psychiatric beds, including 70 beds in rural communities and 123 beds in urban communities,’ HHSC said in a statement.
… ‘Not to discount’ all the efforts the state has made to improve state hospitals, [Mitchell] said. ‘They all may help, and they’re necessary, but they still need to do more.’ ”
Read the full story on the KXAN website.