A psychiatric patient commits suicide after waiting hours in the emergency room at Terrassa Hospital.

BarcelonaA patient with a severe psychiatric disorder committed suicide on August 22 while waiting in an emergency room at the Terrassa University Hospital, sources from the Terrassa Health Consortium (CST) confirmed. The woman had been in the emergency room for two days waiting to be assigned a bed on the psychiatric ward, according to reports. The Newspaper and has been confirmed by the ARA. The CST, the consortium that manages this hospital of the Catalan Health Service (CatSalut), simply stated that the patient's death is "under analysis" by the Patient Quality and Safety Committee.

The Terrassa University Hospital currently has 16 psychiatric beds. According to the CST works council, the hospital had planned to add eight more beds, but did not do so because CatSalut ruled out funding its expansion. The center also had a home hospitalization service (known as HAD), which allowed patients with mental disorders to be treated at home. Specifically, it had 16 such beds, but closed eight in February, and last July it closed the other eight due to a lack of clinical psychiatrists, according to the vice president of the works council, Maria Teresa Gil. "We've had up to 19 psychiatric patients waiting in the emergency room for a bed," he complained.

The CST has neither confirmed nor denied this information. Meanwhile, sources from the Department of Health, when asked about the possible expansion of the hospital's psychiatric beds, declined to comment on the center's "internal management." They did, however, assure us that they are investigating the case of the woman who committed suicide. In fact, the Terrassa City Council considers it "essential" for the Generalitat to open an investigation. It also asked the hospital to conduct an "internal review" of the case to analyze its operations and protocols to ensure that a similar situation will not happen again.

Currently, the public mental health care system is overwhelmed, and only particularly serious cases can be treated in hospitals. The woman who committed suicide in the emergency room of Terrassa Hospital was a serious case, but her life could not be saved. She was between 30 and 40 years old, according to another member of the works council, Tai Pérez, who claims that the incident shocked the hospital staff. In fact, two healthcare workers remain on sick leave.

These events have also reached the political sphere. ERC, PP, and Vox have requested that the Minister of Health, Olga Pané, appear before the Parliament's Health Committee to provide explanations.

Patients who run away

The events have come to light not because the CST or the Department of Health reported them, but because the CST's own works council decided to make them public after the hospital management had taken no action following what happened, according to the committee's president, Xavier Lleonart. In fact, he says, three days after the tragic incident, another psychiatric patient escaped from the hospital's emergency room while waiting. "We found him walking along the road in his hospital gown," he adds.

Patients with mental illness are treated in the general emergency room at Terrassa Hospital. In other words, there are no specific emergency rooms for these patients to avoid stigmatization. What is wrong, according to Lleonart, is that these patients have to wait for days on end. "Some patients have had to wait four or five weeks in an emergency room before being admitted," he says. "And emergency rooms don't have the infrastructure to care for them, nor are they the best place for them to be, with people coming and going, patients in the hallways, and chronic chaos. What can happen there is completely uncontrollable," he laments.

In fact, at the beginning of July, the CST works council had already sounded the alarm. They sent a letter to the hospital management denouncing that they could not "guarantee patient safety" due to the high number of people they had to see every day in the emergency room. However, they received no response.

The emergency department has specific bays for patients with mental illness. However, the hospital's psychiatric ward has a whole series of additional security measures in place. For example, it is completely closed, the nursing area where medication is stored is also inaccessible, rooms are single, there is a higher ratio of nurses, and plastic cups and cutlery are used at meals. In addition to the hospital's lack of psychiatric beds, in Terrassa "there is no primary care emergency center, even though it is the third most populated city in Catalonia," Lleonart complains. That is, all emergency cases end up in the hospital, which further overloads the service.

"Unfortunately, cases like this are happening more and more often due to a lack of space and specialized professionals in the sector," declared the president of the Catalan Mental Health Federation, Mercè Torrentallé, referring to the woman who committed suicide in August and highlighting that this wasn't the case. In other words, there are many more incidents, even if they aren't made public.

According to Torrentallé, the problem also lies in the fact that patients with mental illnesses go to the emergency room when they are already "very deteriorated" and "in an extreme situation" because they have been unable to undergo therapy precisely due to the lack of resources in the public system. "We assist people in times of crisis, but we don't address the depth of the structural problems. The lack of resources is not only in healthcare, but also in all aspects of life: access to work, access to housing," emphasizes the president, who believes that preventive work is also essential.

Magda Casamitjana, who until last year was director of the National Pact on Mental Health in Catalonia, agrees: "We need to triple the budget for Social Rights and implement territorial resource planning to understand the demands and deficiencies." She says this has already been done in Australia with excellent results, and is beginning to be done in France and the Nordic countries. Now it only needs to be applied in Catalonia.