Our State suffers from a serious lack of psychiatric providers in rural settings. This is because our psychiatrists are clustered around Seattle and Spokane – with few of us choosing to live in rural communities and settings. However, even if our psychiatrists were better distributed across the state, we would still not have enough psychiatric providers for all of the patients in need of care. In order to meet the psychiatric needs of all of our communities, we must leverage what resources we DO have by working more efficiently and more effectively.

Thus we are excited to report on a new hospital-to-hospital telepsychiatric consultation program in partnership with Capital Medical Center in Olympia. With this new program, patients who are involuntarily detained will be admitted onto a modified inpatient medical unit until a psychiatric bed becomes available. Patients and care providers will video-consult with UW psychiatrists, allowing the local team to implement treatments promptly — before they are transferred to the psychiatric facility. Without this program, patients might have to wait in the emergency room for days until a specialty psychiatry bed becomes available. This new consultation program will also be available for patients with mental health needs in the medical / surgical beds of the hospital, a welcome addition to the capacity at Capital Medical Center which does not have access to psychiatric consultation now. We hope that this partnership will be a boon for patient care at Capital Medical Center and that it will serve as a model for providing access to psychiatric consultation in other rural community hospitals in our state.

The UW – Capital Medical Center Telepsychiatry Consultation Program will be available to Capital Medical Center patients and care providers 7-days per week, 9am-5pm, and is scheduled to start in Summer of 2015.