Response to Moulin and Jones: “The Alameda Model: An Effort Worth Emulating”

We sincerely appreciate the thoughtful discussion of our study from Drs. Moulin and Jones. However, we would like to provide clarification on several of the points they raised. As Moulin and Jones correctly indicate, there is no delineation of the relative acuity of the study patients to those seen in other emergency settings in California. However, we are unaware of any established metric to provide such a comparison for this patient population, and no such categorization was noted in any of the other boarding time studies cited in the article. And while Alameda County does have an elevated number of involuntary psychiatric holds, the county also has a disproportionate share of California’s chronic and persistently mentally ill residents – out of which arise a significant percentage of the psychiatric emergencies. This might be attributable to the agreeable local climate and the tolerance of Berkeley and Oakland for those with alternative and transient lifestyles. But also, the county has a great number of psychiatric boarding homes and nursing facilities into which other Bay Area counties place many of their most severely psychiatrically disabled. We postulate that it is these population factors, along with persisting inner-city dilemmas like crack cocaine and concentrated poverty (which are less an issue in most other parts of the state), that lead to the increased involuntary detentions. Further, the greatest percentage of the patients brought to the study site are detained by police in Oakland, a city recently described as the second most-dangerous in the United States (U.S.), due to its high incidence of violent crimes.1 Yet Oakland has a police officer to population ratio less than half of the nation’s most dangerous city, Detroit.1 The idea that the relatively overwhelmed Oakland police would be taking time away from intervening in violent crimes, to instead detain subacute psychiatric patients that other counties would not find in need of treatment, seems contrary to common sense. The Federal Demonstration Project allowing more psychiatric hospitals to accept Medicaid has two major Alameda Health System, Department of Psychiatric Emergency Services, Oakland, California