Vacancies at Mental Hospitals a Disaster

[papau]

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lopez10aug10,0,803671.story?track=tottext

STEVE LOPEZ / POINTS WEST
Vacancies at Mental Hospitals a Disaster
Steve Lopez
Points West

August 10, 2005

<snip>
At Atascadero, Hunter told me he's down roughly 100 nursing positions. Those are budgeted jobs that he hasn't been able to fill. The hospital is also down 10 each of psychiatrists and psychologists to serve a population that hovers as high as 1,367.

The day of the suicide last week, an Atascadero psychiatrist e-mailed me to say: "Violence is a way of life . Last night a nurse on Unit 6 was beaten about the face by a patient. She is out of work. Such events occur about every week or two…. Violence upon patients by other patients is never reported and is routine."<snip>

I was faxed an April letter, signed by 27 Atascadero doctors and sent to state mental health Director Stephen Mayberg, that pleaded for relief from caseloads as high as 106 patients per psychiatrist."We are not just concerned about our excessive workload and increased liability," the letter said. "We are also concerned that the excessive caseloads are violating the civil rights of our patients…. We also believe our working conditions are becoming increasingly dangerous due, in part, to the lack of psychiatrists. As we are stretched thinner and thinner, we are being threatened and attacked at an unprecedented rate."<snip>

I can't speak to the vagaries of that argument, but it doesn't take a PhD to realize you're asking for trouble when the four-hospital system has 1,000 unfilled positions, as the state mental health director told me last week. State officials keep telling me it's not a budget problem. They insist they're just having trouble recruiting employees, during this time of sky-high real estate prices, for difficult jobs that don't pay the greatest salaries in the industry.

Well, doesn't that make it a budget problem in the end? Pay a little more to fill those vacancies and maybe there won't be as many deaths by hanging. The state currently pays psychiatrists a premium of roughly $2,000 a month above the basic state salary scale for psychiatrists to tempt them into the state mental hospitals, but for nurses, the pay differential is only a few hundred dollars.<snip>

[Demeter]

1. Hire Half as Many At Twice The Salary

and solve at least part of your problem (duh).

[bemildred]

2. Takes me back the the Raygun governorship.

The first sign of the new dispensation was mentally ill bums on the street.

[papau]

3. True - both as Gov when he refused to fund the new smaller hospitals

after getting the closing of the awful warehouse monsters (there was a Court order to close these - and the Cal leg passed a bill to replace them with better - but Reagan refused to spend the money), and later as President when he repealed Carter's Mental Health program, in Aug 81 in his budget saying "block grants" were better - and then cut block grants, putting 5000 St Eliz (Wash DC) folks on the street via the DC city being unable to get money through Congress on their separate Budget without the grant from the Carter Bill.