Office of Primary Care and Area Health Education Centers (AHEC) Program

Benjamin Smith, M.D., clinical assistant professor of emergency medicine

(JANUARY 27, 2023) Benjamin Smith, M.D., clinical assistant professor of emergency medicine, was interviewed by VT Digger for an article about COVID-19’s impact on inpatient mental health care and emergency departments.

New numbers reported this week suggest that inpatient psychiatric care capacity in Vermont slowly started to rebound last year, but still remains significantly below pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, the total number of days that patients seeking mental health care spent in emergency departments statewide reached new heights. That number, over 10,500 days, now appears to be more than triple what a similar analysis found as a baseline in 2015.

That result is not surprising to Smith, medical director of the emergency department at Central Vermont Medical Center in Berlin. His department’s internal numbers show at least a doubling of inpatient days waiting for crisis mental health care over the last five years. The impacts on patients of all kinds seeking care and on his staff are profound, he said.

More inpatient beds, however, would help those patients who are the most sick. Those are the people who end up in the emergency department for the longest periods, Smith said, comparing the result to not being able to send someone having a heart attack to intensive care. “It’s really, to my mind, a humanitarian crisis that is happening right here in Vermont,” he said.