Emergency Care: #7 Emerging Adults with Mental Illness

Dr. Joel Hudgins muses on up and downstream changes to Peds ED for emerging adults with mental illness. Higher numbers & acuity, too few beds, services, & staff

About the Show
Welcome to Health Hats, learning on the journey toward best health. I am Danny van Leeuwen, a two-legged, old, cisgender, white man with privilege, living in a food oasis, who can afford many hats and knows a little about a lot of healthcare and a lot about very little. Most people wear hats one at a time, but I wear them all at once.  I'm the Rosetta Stone of Healthcare. We will listen and learn about what it takes to adjust to life's realities in the awesome circus of healthcare.  Let's make some sense of all this.

We respect Listeners, Watchers, and Readers. Show Notes at the end.
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The same content as the podcast, but not a verbatim transcript. A newsletter-like version with images. Could be a book chapter. download the printable transcript here
Contents
Proem.. 1

Update on Mighty Mouth Casey Quinlan. 2

Podcast intro. 2

Health is fragile. 2

Crossing the threshold into the ED. 2

How can we help up front?. 3

Upstream and downstream issues 4

Can we really help? It takes a toll. 4

A word from our sponsor, Abridge. 5

System interventions/solutions. 5

Hopeful, hopeless 6

Real people all around. 6

Profound knowledge. 7

Academic medical center versus critical access hospital 7

Reflection. 8

Next: Episode #8: COAST. 8

Podcast Outro. 9
Proem
In this series we’ve met Emeka and Annie, two emerging adults with mental illness and Emeka’s mom, Erika. We learned about their ‘something’s wrong’ experience, finding treatment, family dynamics, and recovery. We met Matt, a high school teacher leading a student-run welcoming Ambassador program, and Dr. Bonnie, a primary care doc, managing the care of emerging adults with developing and full-blown illness with limited resources. You can see that I’m starting in the center with lived experience and spiraling out.

Photo by razvan-mirel-xhYhjMIfsq8-unsplash

Welcome to today’s episode, #7 in the series, of the lived experience of another professional, Dr Joel Hudgins, pediatric emergency physician at Boston Children’s Hospital.  Full disclosure, I worked from 2002 to 2008 at Boston Children’s leading their patient family experience initiative and I worked as a nurse/paramedic at two rural hospitals in West Virginia in the late eighties, early nineties. Despite my experience in pediatrics and emergency services, I feel out-of-touch with the dynamics of treating an increasing proportion of youth with mental illness while also faced with exploding infectious disease incidence, COVID, RSV, and flu. Emergency care and pediatrics are near and dear to my heart. Let’s see what we can learn with Dr. Joel Hudgins.
Update on Mighty Mouth Casey Quinlan
Before we begin, I published my last episode on April 1, 2023, the mashup of my chats with Casey Quinlan. Many subscribers reached out to me. Is Casey alive or has she passed? I purposefully left it ambiguous because I didn’t know when people would be reading, listening, or watching. Besides, Casey told me several times over the years when I called her about various deaths in my family, why do funerals and memorial services need to come after death? Anyway, as of today, April 12, 2023, Casey lives in a hospice, with several visitors a day, alert for short periods of time, still snarky. Go to CaringBridge.com, for up-to-date information from Jan Oldenburg.

From Health Hats, the Podcast https://health-hats.com/pod193/
Podcast intro
Welcome to Health Hats, the Podcast. I'm Danny van Leeuwen, a two-legged cisgender old white man of privilege who knows a little bit about a lot of healthcare and a lot about very little. We will listen and learn about what it takes to adjust to life's realities in the awesome circus of healthcare. Let's make some sense of all of this.
Health is fragile