Emergency departments at a hospital can be packed with people who are sick and injured. Add some overcrowding, maybe long waits and a lack of privacy on top.

All emergency departments are not like a scene from “The Pitt” or your other hospital drama of choice. But they are far from the best place to be for a child dealing with a behavioral health crisis.

In 2024, St. Charles Health System had 110 children in behavioral health crisis staying in its emergency department for more than 24 hours. It’s too many for too long. And that situation is playing out across Oregon. There is not a better place for the children to go. There is a void in in-patient behavioral health care treatment for children.

Democratic legislators from Bend, state Sen. Anthony Broadman and Rep. Emerson Levy, joined up to introduce legislation, House Bill 3085, to create a pilot program for regional child psychiatric centers to fill the need in different regions of the state.

They are putting their efforts behind an effort by Deschutes County for about $3 million from the Legislature to build a Central Oregon Child Psychiatric Facility. The plan is apparently to locate it in Redmond. If the money comes through, construction could conceivably be completed in 2027.

“Chronic systemic issues in Oregon’s behavioral health system leave children and their families in crisis seeking safety in Emergency Departments,” Deschutes County noted in its application. “The lack of psychiatric services, residential beds, and crisis placements in Central Oregon has led to youth with severe behavioral health (BH) needs being held in inappropriate settings such as Emergency Departments (ED), exacerbating underlying trauma and leading to suboptimal treatment. ED settings have minimal BH services.”

The big question is if the Legislature will find the money to support this effort. We don’t know. If this effort does not succeed, there does need to be a better solution than warehousing children in crisis in emergency rooms.