Sorry, just catching up. Been out of the loop for about a week. My apologies then for bringing up a topic from the last thread. I can't quote any posts from it, so will just share my experience regarding the likelihood of Timothy being treated in a psychiatric facility with no one being aware of it. The chances of him being admitted with his ID and insurance card found at his home.
The last 15 years of my nursing career were spent on an acute, adult in-patient, locked psychiatric unit of a regular hospital in a large urban city. I was Charge Nurse of the unit for the last 7 years.
I'm not saying that all psych units follow universal policies, but I believe the majority of them function in a similar manner.
The first rule is always patient privacy. HIPAA safeguards all patient information anyway, but psychiatric admissions are extremely confidential.
No one is given information without the patient's permission. All patients are given a code number. They are the only ones authorized to give that number to whomever they wish. All we could say to a caller ( without a code number ) was that we could not confirm or deny that the person was a patient.
However, as another person posted, ( sorry I can't quote to give proper credit ) LE is the exception. If the patient was on their radar for any reason, LE was given the information relating to that specific offense. Since some were arrested upon discharge, LE was notified and waiting at the door when they exited.
Another exception is if the patient made a threat against a specific individual. We were required to notify that person of the threat before the patient was discharged, as well as LE.
As for personal valuables of our patients, ( including their phones, ID and Insurance cards ) they were locked up in a separate area across the hall from our unit. No one except psychiatric staff had access to that locked area.
In fact, we even had a separate psychiatric team that admitted our patients. They took care of the insurance authorization, and were the ones responsible for listing and locking up all items.
Even for the main hospital operators, the 'names' for all the patients for our unit showed up for them as only 'privacy patient.' They never saw a real name and had no access to any information.
We had a few 'John Does' who we treated and stabilized. Their identities were resolved fairly quickly though. There were no situations like Timothy's.
We also had many patients without ID cards or even insurance at all. They were not required to be treated. But there was usually a way to verify their identity.
In my opinion, I don't believe Timothy is being treated in any psych facility.
I realize, as someone previously said, if you're under a specific health care insurer, you could be in their system already, and wouldn't need to show an insurance card. This is becoming more frequent as these systems progress, I agree.
But for many reasons, I don't see that happening here.
I wish he was. I wish I had that hope he was getting help, but I don't have a good feeling about this. The situation sounds like a mental health crisis and I don't think it's going to end well.
My heart goes out to him for all he has gone through, and everyone who cares about him...
JMO
