Legislative Services

The Joint Committee on Access and Forensic Services has approved its 2021 report on mental health bed allocation methodology. The report will be submitted to the Health and Human Services Commission's executive commissioner and the Legislature by Dec. 1.

A copy of the adopted, but not yet submitted, report is available here.

The committee is statutorily charged with developing and making recommendations for a mental health bed allocation methodology. The methodology allocates a certain number of state-funded beds to each designated region in state hospitals and other inpatient mental health facilities for voluntary, civil and forensic patients. The committee must also make recommendations pertaining to the implementation of a bed-day utilization review protocol, including a peer review process.

Counties have seen the waitlist for forensic beds continually increase, with the average length of time on the waitlist now at 287 days. In December 2020, there were about 1,450 people on the forensic waitlist. By December 2021, that number had grown to more than 1,900.

For more information about this article or the report, please contact Rick Thompson.