Maryland kids in distress are being kept in emergency departments for weeks, months

Hundreds of Maryland children have spent weeks or months living in emergency departments and other areas of hospitals over the last few years — confined to bare rooms and barred from going outside, seeing friends or having access to an education. The longer these children with behavioral issues stay, hospital physicians and administrators say, the more their mental health deteriorates, and the more that limited and costly emergency room resources are shifted away from other patients.