It has been a month since President Trump declared a state of national emergency due to the COVID pandemic—March 13. Coincidentally, on that same day, the noted psychiatrist and writer Dinah Miller published an excellent article in Clinical Psychiatry News (https://www.mdedge.com/psychiatry/article/219014/schizophrenia-other-psychotic-disorders/coronavirus-inpatient-unit-new) entitled Coronavirus on the Inpatient Unit: A New Challenge for Psychiatry.
In that article, she reviewed some of the particular challenges posed by COVID in psychiatric hospital settings, such as:
- Inpatient treatment inherently involves social interaction
- Some inpatients are uncooperative and violent, increasing the chance of contagion
- Due to the severity of their psychiatric illness, inpatients may resist or be unable to cooperate with basic hygiene measures
- Psychiatric patients have particularly high death rates because of the higher rate of underlying illnesses such as diabetes, lung and heart disease.
Dr. Miller’s article provided an impetus for medical directors and administrators of psychiatric hospitals to draft anti-COVID policies. I’ve posted some articles about aspects of such policies, such as social distancing (link), and telemedicine (link).
I’ve also created a template of a COVID preparedness policy for psychiatric inpatient units, which you can access here. Feel free to review/use/steal whatever aspects you might find useful. And if you would like to share your own hospital’s policy, please email me at [email protected]. I will gladly post it on this website so that others can benefit from it.