Federal probe sought of alleged 'dumping' of mental patient in Sacramento

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Sacramento Bee

Federal probe sought of alleged 'dumping' of mental patient in Sacramento
By Cynthia Hubert
[e-mail]
Published: Tuesday, Mar. 5, 2013 - 12:00 am |

A California state lawmaker is calling for a federal investigation into the alleged "dumping" of a Nevada mental patient last month in Sacramento.

Hospital and health officials in Nevada, meanwhile, vowed to look into the circumstances surrounding the patient's release and issue a public report about what happened.

"We don't take this lightly at all," said Dr. Tracey Green, Nevada's state health officer.

The patient, James Flavy Coy Brown, 48, disappeared onto Sacramento's streets last month, a day after he arrived by Greyhound bus from Las Vegas, according to staffers at the Loaves & Fishes homeless services complex near downtown Sacramento. According to staffers who spoke to him, he said he had no family in Sacramento and had never visited the capital city.

Brown was frightened and confused when he arrived at the Loaves & Fishes complex on Feb. 13, staffer Molly Simones said. He carried his discharge papers from the Southern Nevada Adult Mental Health Services psychiatric hospital and a schedule detailing his 15-hour bus ride from Las Vegas.

Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/03/05/5236303/federal-probe-sought-of-alleged.html#storylink=cpy

[fasttense]

1. I suspect it happens a whole lot more than our corporate media

will admit.

If you're a hospital trying to make profits to pay its CEOs the millions he needs to survive, a patient whose insurance has run out is just not worth keeping around.

[Kolesar]

2. Right out of Michael Moore's "Sicko"

A "teaching hospital" put a delirious patient in a taxi and told the driver to put her out on some street corner near a bakery or some other business. The company's security camera picked up the scene.

[Left Coast2020]

9. I remember that story

That happened in Los Angeles a few years ago. And apparently it has happened more than once.
################

Los Angeles city prosecutors are investigating a Costa Mesa hospital for allegedly taking a mentally ill man 42 miles to downtown's skid row and leaving him near the Union Rescue Mission, officials said.

A van reportedly dropped the man outside the mission, one of the larger downtown facilities providing services to the homeless, after he was discharged from College Hospital in Costa Mesa last week. The man, described as possibly schizophrenic and bipolar, was taken to an L.A. area hospital after being tended by mission staffers, city officials said.

Prosecutors in City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo's office are investigating the incident.

"The bottom line is we are . . . taking it very seriously," said Jeff Isaacs, chief of the city attorney's criminal prosecutions. "It could be another classic case of dumping."

During the last 2 1/2 years, Delgadillo's office has filed criminal charges against a hospital, sued several other medical facilities and extracted an extensive settlement from Kaiser hospitals for dumping homeless patients.


http://articles.latimes.com/2008/may/07/local/me-dumping7

[Kolesar]

10. Costa Mesa seems like a snooty place

Orange County/aerospace contractor culture.

[HereSince1628]

3. "Greyhound therapy", proof that criminally greedy bastards CAN run psychiatric facilities.

If only I had power point...it wouldn't take much to transform their logo into an administrator kicking a patient into California.

[Trillo]

4. "mental illness"? Or poverty? NT

[HereSince1628]

6. Not sure that was meant to reply to me, but I'll say the two are positively correlated

Mental illness frequently interferes with the capacity for 'normal' socio-economic functioning. The sort of dysfunction that results in regular or long hospitalizations severely interferes with employment. Overtime interruptions interfere with employability, earnings capacity and access to employer provided benefits leading to worsening health and increasing impoverishment.

Of course there are exceptions...but the existence of exceptions doesn't undo the correlation.

[dixiegrrrrl]

7. County sheriff depts did that here as late as 1998.

Any mentally ill who did not live in the county was driven to the nearest town in the next county.
I know this for a fact, I was working in Mental Health Dept. at the time in our county.
don't know if it was done in the 4 big cities in Alabama which had large Mental Health centers,
but it was done in the rural counties.

[mainer]

8. We have records of "moving poor around" back in the 1700s too

Because feeding the poor was the responsibility of the town they lived in, some towns would try to move people elsewhere. Some things never change.

[mainer]

5. I know another hospital that did this.

Medical residents chipped in to buy a bus ticket for a particularly nasty and incorrigible patient. They gave him his discharge papers, including a transfer summary, and told him to check into a hospital 800 miles away. The receiving medical residents were none too pleased to get this "gift." But both sending and receiving hospital were charity institutions.

This was decades ago.