SECTION 1.
The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:(a) Psychiatric beds are an essential infrastructure for meeting the needs of individuals with serious mental health conditions. These beds serve several functions, including enabling safe, stable, and supportive environments for individuals in acute mental health crisis and for those with significant impairment who require ongoing medical monitoring.
(b) Psychiatric bed capacity is severely strained in California and the United States. The present situation may be viewed, in part, as the long tale of an effort to
deinstitutionalize psychiatric services throughout the United States during the latter half of the 20th century.
(c) Today, hundreds of Californians in need of psychiatric beds are held in hospital’s emergency departments or county jails awaiting openings in inpatient care settings.
(d) According to data compiled by the Department of Health Care Access and Information, California has lost 37 psychiatric facilities from 1999 to 2016, either through the elimination of psychiatric inpatient care, or complete hospital closure. During this same period, California’s population grew by 24 percent, or 7,600,000 people.
(e) California is home to over 1,000,000 adults who are afflicted with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder,
with over 477,000 going untreated.
(f) According to a recent Rand Study, it is “estimated that California requires 50.5 inpatient psychiatric beds per 100,000 adults: 26.0 per 100,000 at the acute level and 24.6 at the subacute level.”
(g) In the rapidly growing and ethnically diverse area of Inland Empire in southern California, the shortage of beds is particularly severe and the Department of Health Care Access and Information’s data in 2016 shows there was a need of an additional 2,264 beds.
(h) For example, the County of Riverside currently has 8.3 acute care inpatient psychiatric beds per 100,000. The need for
acute psychiatric beds is even greater in the San Joaquin Valley where there are only 6.81 beds per 100,000 people.