The Maine Department of Health & Human Services has updated the forms that hospitals must use to apply to involuntarily commit a patient.
The new forms became necessary following a Law Court
decision ruling that when a hospital determines that a person meets the requirements of section 3863(1) and it has a certificate from a medical practitioner that complies with section 3863(2), but there is no available psychiatric bed to which the person can be transferred, the hospital may detain the person for up to 24 hours
only if it seeks to have the application for emergency hospitalization reviewed and approved by a judicial officer “immediately upon execution of [that] certificate.”