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When was the last time you went to a hospital emergency room in Tucson and managed to see a doctor within a half-hour? As soon as you quit laughing over the absurdity of the question, answer this one: When was the last time you went to an emergency room with a medical problem and found yourself sitting next to somebody who was having a mental health crisis?

As doctors and patients know, long waits at hospital emergency rooms are the rule rather than the exception in Tucson, and the absence of adequate facilities for behavioral health patients makes the wait precarious for everybody involved. Both problems require immediate attention. Local emergency rooms are overwhelmed — too many patients, not enough doctors, and no efficient way to segregate a person with a mental health crisis from one waiting for other medical care.

Some of these problems are now being addressed by expansion plans at University Medical Center, the region's only trauma center, but more steps are needed to meet the needs of psychiatric patients.

Last week, the Board of Supervisors addressed this need by agreeing to seek $54 million in bonds for two additions to University Physicians Hospital at Kino, a proposal we strongly support.

The new buildings would house a psychiatric hospital and a separate emergency room and urgent care center for mental health patients who require immediate intervention but not necessarily hospitalization.

The new facilities are essential to meet the behavioral health needs of a burgeoning population, including an explosion of methamphetamine abusers.

County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry, in a December memorandum to the Board of Supervisors, noted that of the nearly 3,500 visits to the Kino emergency room in 2005, approximately 58 percent "involved some form of substance abuse."

While most local hospitals have psychiatric social workers who do crisis intervention work, "only a few hospitals have psychiatrists available, and the undiagnosed patient languishes for hours and sometimes days," waiting for treatment, Dr. Harvey W. Meislin, head of the department of emergency medicine at at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center, said in a meeting with the Star's editorial board.

"Other communities have a psychiatric emergency department where they can do psychiatric and medical diagnoses. We don't have any such thing connected to any emergency department in this community."

Dr. Kevin Reilly, medical director of the emergency department at Kino , said in the same meeting that, locally, there has been "a tremendous increase in substance abuse. Almost daily we see amphetamine cases."

It is not a good idea, Reilly said, to keep those patients in the same waiting room as medical patients. "They'd have a better therapeutic outcome if they were segregated," he said.

"The reason they're held up in emergency rooms right now is that there's no place to send them because there's not a psychiatric bed available, and for those who don't require hospitalization but need some kind of care, it can take several hours or a day or so to get them into a program," said Norm Botsford, president and CEO of University Physicians Healthcare.

The bond requests will appear on the ballot May 16 —the same election that will ask voters to approve a half-cent sales tax to finance transportation improvements in the Tucson region. The Kino expansions will be two items, $18 million for a psychiatric urgent care facility and $36 million for an 80- to 90-bed psychiatric hospital.

The bonds address a pressing need and should be approved.