New law will fast-track youth mental health hospital near Durham

Children in North Carolina who are facing serious psychological issues will soon face shorter wait times to get treatment under a bill Gov. Roy Cooper signed into law Friday.

The law will allow a state-run hospital in Butner, just outside Durham, to transition from an adult substance abuse center to an adolescent mental health hospital, starting this summer. The facility will have 54 beds at first, and will eventually expand to treat 90 patients at any given time.

“This new law will help more children and young people get the inpatient psychiatric care they need and continues our efforts to improve mental health care in North Carolina,” said Cooper, a Democrat who also this week unveiled a proposal for the state to spend $1 billion on a range of various mental health improvements.

Young people have sometimes been forced to live for weeks, even months, in hospital emergency rooms while waiting for mental health care beds to open up, WRAL News has previously reported.

When passing the bill through the state legislature in recent weeks, its Republican sponsors spoke of children as young as 7 years old who faced serious enough mental problems that they needed to be hospitalized — but were forced to wait for weeks on end, stuck in general hospitals, not mental hospitals, where they couldn’t get the help they needed.

Senate bill seeks to add youth mental health beds in Butner

“I have some family members that work in pediatric health care, and I hear stories about children being triaged with these mental health issues into emergency departments or intensive care units, without staff with the necessary training,” Sen. Benton Sawrey, a Republican from Johnston County, said during one recent committee hearing. “It’s a safety issue for staff. It’s a safety issue for patients. We’re doing a disservice to these children.”

The bill passed the legislature with unanimous support, even though it utilized a controversial tactic to let the hospital open so quickly. The new law will grant UNC Health an exemption to the state’s certificate-of-need rules that often lead to lengthy legal battles over which health care provider should be allowed to operate a proposed facility.