To Bozeman Hospital Board of
Directors:
I am a retired emergency physician living in Bozeman. For 35 years I took psychiatric patients from Bozeman, by ambulance and sheriff transfer, to Helena, Missoula and Billings Emergency Departments. After all that work for Bozeman, I expect you to pay attention to what I am telling you.
First of all, your CEO is overpaid — $889,171 in 2019. Are you kidding?
Second, Bozeman Health’s lack of inpatient psychiatric care is well known to every hospital in Montana. There is no excuse for your administrative behavior, buried as it is in the empty rhetoric of your PR department.
You can’t imagine the number of times “eyes have rolled” in Emergency Departments because the message is, “Another psych transport from Bozeman!” How many times has the emergency department doctor in Bozeman told me “ Thanks for not being hostile” when I talk to them before transport? They know they are dumping patients.
One other thing — you think patients are transported directly to psychiatry units. They aren’t!
They are legally transferred to the accepting emergency physician. Our psychiatry department is holding a bed, but patients must be cleared first through the emergency department. That means a whole new workup, including labs and toxicology screening. A whole new mental health evaluation too. A double emergency department workup (and billing) for these patients. Psychiatrists will not admit new patients until medically cleared by their own hospital Emergency Departments. Those are the facts.
You are spending millions of Bozeman’s health care dollars. Please pay attention to those who treat patients and the patients themselves, not out of touch administrators. I won’t pretend your CEO, John Hill, is worth talking to.
Michael Alexander Sirr M.D.
Bozeman
Bozeman Daily Chronicle Letter to the Editor 3/26/21