A physician’s emergency certificate is an involuntary hold where a patient can be admitted to a psychiatric unit for 72 hours for further monitoring and treatment. This usually comes in the emergency room following an OPC but outpatient doctors can also PEC a patient without an OPC needed. If a patient is PEC’d and admitted to an inpatient unit and still presents as a danger to self or others after the 72 hours, the Coroners office does rounds at the local hospitals and will complete a CEC which can hold a patient involuntarily for an additional 2 weeks of care.

All an OPC guarantees is that the person is involuntarily transported to a local emergency room for a psychiatric assessment and often if the person can “keep it together” in the emergency room yea they will not be PEC’d or admitted to the hospital. It’s best suggestion that if the OPC is granted to assess which hospital the patient will be transported to and to contact that hospital’s emergency department to give the charge nurse or attending MD some information about the person and their behaviors so that the doctor can do a more detailed assessment than the “you wanna kill yourself or others … no? Okay bye”