Residents and supporters in San Francisco protested a plan to close the Behavioral Health Center at SF General Hospital, which would displace 82 patients, many of whom suffer from serious mental illnesses but are stable. Patients fear being moved to less suitable environments, while Dr. Mark Leary highlighted a critical shortage of long-term locked psychiatric care beds, warning that many mental illness patients end up in emergency rooms, are homeless, or even incarcerated due to inadequate care. The plan aims to convert the center into locked housing to help alleviate this crisis and boost overall support in mental health treatment.
I'm concerned that we don't have a safe environment like we have here," said Rufus Timmonn, a patient at the Behavioral Health Center at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, who doesn't want to move to another facility.
Because of that shortage, that lack of those kind of beds people end up waiting for a long period of time in the emergency room for a bed when they in a crisis in a mental health crisis or they don't even get to the emergency.
We are actually in a crisis right now because we don't have enough locked long term care psychiatric beds for people that have serious mental illness.
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