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GREENSBORO — A mentally ill Greensboro man spent five days at Moses Cone’s emergency room handcuffed to a bed, waiting for transfer to the state’s new, but at-capacity, psychiatric hospital, police said Thursday.

The man, whose name was withheld because of federal privacy rules, grew combative and was served with involuntary commitment papers when he arrived Sunday at the ER, said Capt. Brian James, the patrol operations commander at the Greensboro Police Department.

The patient was ordered for treatment at Central Regional Hospital in Butner, the state hospital intended to replace John Umstead and Dorothea Dix.

But because the hospital that opened last July already has a waiting list, police were left with nowhere to take him. So for five days, officers had to stand guard in pairs, as procedure requires, round the clock at Cone’s ER.

“Once we serve those papers, he’s in our custody at that point,” James said. “And if we’re waiting for a bed, we’re at the mercy of the state. We’re stuck.”

A Cone spokesman, although prohibited from discussing individual patients, agreed. 

“We’re stuck right along with them,” said Doug Allred, noting that not every mental health patient can be treated in Cone’s psychiatric wing or at the short-stay Moses Cone Behavioral Health (formerly Charter), particularly if patients are violent.

Allred said that 24- to 48-hour waits to get into state mental hospitals have become routine, but that a five-day wait in Cone’s ER was, up to now, unheard of.

After inquiries from the News & Record, the newly-hired administrator for state-operated hospitals, Luckey Welsh, said late Thursday that the patient was about to be taken to Butner.

Welsh, hired five weeks ago by the state’s incoming Health and Human Services secretary, said the admissions delays were necessary to insure the safety of current patients and the staff at Central Regional.

The hospital was beset by controversy and threats to its federal funding before it even opened last summer. Since then, treating the most difficult cases and continually understaffed and at capacity, the picture at the hospital has only grown worse.

“We have to serve everyone, and we treat the very sickest individuals,” Welsh said. “Certainly, these delays (in admissions) do trouble us, but they are necessary.”

Welsh said that as stressful as five days and nights in the emergency department must have been for the patient, it was “better than a jail cell” — the de facto holding facility in many counties.

Had the Cone ER patient been a client at Guilford Center, the county mental health agency, he likely could have been held at a padded emergency holding unit at Bellemeade to wait for transfer, said nursing director Paula Snipes.

But once police served the papers at Cone, Capt. James noted, the law dictated that the patient be held at a treatment center and not a jail. There were no hospitals nearby able to accommodate him because he posed a danger.

Greensboro police Chief Tim Bellamy, in a speech earlier this spring to a group of city merchants, wondered aloud what the effect would be on the city of the state psychiatric hospitals having reached capacity.

Wednesday night, watch commander Lt. Karen Walters got a glimpse. Working the 5 p.m. to 5 a.m. shift, she took two cars off street patrol so that two officers could stand guard at the ER, where the mental patient was getting his third meal of the day.

Cone spokesman Allred said there would likely be no bill  — the hospital would just absorb the cost of the five-day stay, as will the police department.

“Did anyone know that it would get to this level? People spending days in an emergency department?” he said. “Clearly, the system isn’t working, and it’s a shame.”

Staff writer Sonja Elmquist contributed to this report.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com