Can A Drug Rehab Facility Turn You Away?

You’ve acknowledged the need for rehab to address your substance abuse problem, but now you have a new concern. As you search for the right rehab center to meet your needs, you wonder if they’ll even take you in. Can a drug rehab facility turn you away?

Well, yes, but not just on a whim. There’s a lot of procedures and policies to follow when admitting a patient to any drug rehab facility and certain boxes must be checked when dealing with any patient’s admission.

Now, if you’re experiencing an immediate emergency, such as an overdose or serious medical episode, you can go to the emergency room, where they are legally required to treat you. You cannot be turned away from a hospital ER if you are in legitimate medical danger.

But rehab is a longer, more involved situation and treatment is not automatically guaranteed. On the other hand, no facility is going to turn a patient away for anything less than serious concerns.

First off, you’ll need to find the right drug rehab facility. Every facility, when registering with the state licensing board, creates a mission statement and treatment map that determines who and what they treat as a medical facility. The easiest way to be turned away from a rehab facility is to go to the wrong one that doesn’t treat whatever addiction you have. Some facilities will specialize in certain conditions or addictions — alcoholism, for instance, or perhaps they only deal with patients addicted to so-called “hard” drugs. Trying to gain admission with the wrong addiction will obviously mean getting that rare “No.”

Of course, most such facilities will be happy to refer you to a facility that can treat your addiction.

Even when you find the facility, you’ll need to undergo a medical screening before formal admission, and certain results there could find your admission delayed or deferred for one reason or another, such as other medical conditions that might need to be treated at a hospital before drug rehab could take effect.

For patients with a criminal history, this rarely will earn you a refusal at the facility door. If that’s your primary concern, most facilities will be happy to accept you, even if a handful show reticence.

There is a possible financial side to such admission questions, too. If you don’t have medical insurance, or if your insurance policy will not cover drug rehab for some reason, some drug rehab facilities may turn you away. Most, however, will be happy to work with you on determining some sort of payment plan or other way to receive treatment even if insurance does not step up to pay the bills.

It’s important to remember that drug rehab facilities are there to help patients dealing with serious substance abuse. They WANT to help. They are looking for reasons to say “Yes” to your admission, not reasons to reject you at the door.

Good Landing Recovery is always eager to find reasons to accept new patients and get them the help they need. Even if there are reasons they CAN turn you away, they are far more interested in the reasons to let you in. If you’re looking for rehab, give them a call today.