NUBE 2025

Recognizing that providing excellent care for behavioral health patients in the Emergency Department (ED) is essential to ED staff, management, and the organization's mission and values, an "ED Behavioral Health Core team" is formed. The core team, primarily composed of ED nurses and techs, focuses on the coaching and mentoring of other ED nurses, improving the care of the behavioral patient. The team focuses on patient and staff safety, creating champions for this patient population. They aim to prepare nursing staff better to take care of this population with education, daily shift reports, and monthly in-person meetings to discuss barriers and consider ideas for improvement. Presentations include education on special populations like geriatric psych, severe mental illness (SMI), and pediatrics. Because the team has been so successful and inspiring, it has evolved into a multidisciplinary team with participation from physicians, pharmacists, social workers, and security personnel.  As a community ED, the Chandler Regional ED comprises 60 beds within a Level 1 trauma center. With 70,000 annual ED volumes and 429 inpatient licensed beds, we see over 2,000 patients with a behavioral health concern yearly. This ED has no dedicated space for psychiatric/behavioral patients, has no psychiatric inpatient unit, and boards psychiatric patients in the ED on average twelve hours before transferring them to a psychiatric facility. ED management will also measure team success using data. They will collect data on 1. Restraint use/time in restraints, 2. Completion of safety room checks with security personnel, and 3. Care conference form Usage. Even though there are not many resources for behavioral patients within our hospital, we have successfully recruited ED personnel to champion this patient population's care and have seen objective and subjective improvements very early on.

Learning Objectives:

Conference attendees will be able to identify steps in developing a specialty ER team.

Conference attendees will be able to discuss the benefits of having a behavioral health specialty team in a community ER.

Conference attendees will be able to formulate best practices in recruiting Emergency Department staff to a specialty team.