HELENA -- Montana's state mental hospital is facing a budget-busting nursing shortage, officials said this week, because of low salaries for nurses and a surge of new patients.

The Montana State Hospital in Warm Springs has only 75 percent of the nurses it needs, said Ed Amberg, head of the hospital. Even if the hospital could fill the positions, it still may not have enough staff to handle all the patients the hospital treats.

The hospital has enough money to pay staff to care for 175 patients. But since the beginning of July, it has averaged 196 patients every day. That's 61 more patients than the hospital building was built to handle and seven more than the hospital is licensed to care for.

"It is really very crowded," Amberg said.

The hospital, which treats mostly mentally ill Montanans committed by a judge to Warm Springs or mentally ill felons, has continued to operate with full staffing, Amberg said. But they are doing so by bringing in on-call part-time employees, making people work overtime and by hiring traveling nurses.

"That's extremely expensive for us," he said. "It's really not a very good way to provide patient care. We would much rather spend the money on staff."

Amberg said he thought the hospital's problem is due to an overall nursing shortage in Montana and the lower-than-market wages the hospital pays.

"We have been pretty successful in recruiting, but these jobs are very demanding," he said. "We do pay less than the local market, and it's particularly hard to keep up."

Until this spring, the hospital paid incoming new registered nurses $16.23 an hour or about $33,750 a year. The hospital bumped that pay to $18.23 an hour or about $37,900 a year, which has helped attract new nurses, Amberg said, but pay remains stagnant for nurses with more experience.

The staffing problem started this spring when a rash of nurses quit, which Amberg said prompted the $2-an-hour pay hike.

In the long term, Amberg said he thinks the hospital will have to hire more people to deal with the consistently higher number of patients the hospital treats. It also needs to find a way to pay experienced nurses more and reward nurses and other staff who have stayed at the hospital with higher wages.

Between paying overtime, hiring temporary traveling nurses and dealing with the rising cost of natural gas, electricity and gasoline, the hospital will be hard-pressed to balance its budget this year.

"We try to be careful managing our budget," he said. "It was a problem last year and it's a big problem currently."

The vast majority of people admitted to the hospital don't end up staying there, and admissions are skyrocketing. In 1997, Amberg said, the hospital admitted 327 people. Last year, the hospital took in 637 people and is on track to take in more than 700 this year.

Joyce DeCunzo, administrator of the Addictive and Mental Disorders Division at the state health department, which oversees the hospital, said no one exactly knows why the hospital is seeing so many new admissions.

Some of it may be due to better diagnoses, she said. The state has also invested in community-based mental health services and there may be more places nowadays where mentally ill people can seek help and get diagnosed with a severe mental illness.

"There are probably other factors that we just don't know yet," she said.