Families who deal with members who face mental disabilities understand that with proper treatment, help and a good plan their family members can lead a productive life. Unfortunately, these services have costs - and they also require proper planning and require a state house who is willing to serve them.
As the Brownback administration is finding out, sometimes continued cuts or 'belt tightening' as they continue to advocate has some serious costs. In a reveal today, KHI - the Kansas Health Institute - pointed out exactly how the Brownback plan is paying off in Kansas.
http://www.khi.org/...
OSAWATOMIE — One day last month, Osawatomie State Hospital had 254 patients in its care — almost 50 more than its optimal capacity.
The overcrowded conditions forced a few dozen patients, all of them coping with a serious mental illness and likely a danger to themselves or others, to be triple-bunked in rooms meant for two.
In the end, we are now warehousing patients. Destroying opportunities at longterm wellness and creating a situation that will be hard to rectify.
What caused this?
With the patient count so high, many of the hospital’s direct-care staff were pressed into working one, two and sometimes three overtime shifts a week.
“The place is over census and understaffed,” said Rebecca Proctor, executive director at the Kansas Organization of State Employees, a labor union that represents many state hospital front-line workers. “Conditions there are really, really bad.”
Angela de Rocha, a spokesperson for Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services, confirmed that the Osawatomie hospital’s patient count on July 15 was “an overall high for the past 10 years.”
When the known flack for the Brownback administration has to admit the obvious - that this is an overpopulation high that hasn't occurred in ten years, only now, only under Brownback do you understand what the impacts of austerity are on a community.
The situation in Kansas regarding mental health care services has been in a series of declines for some time.
http://cjonline.com/...
“This is the most significant change we have made to the Kansas mental health system in two decades,” Brownback said. “Our goal is to establish and support alternative community programs that will decrease reliance on Osawatomie State Hospital and the unnecessary use of local emergency rooms, community hospitals and jails.”
Brownback also announced that 111 jobs previously located at Rainbow will be shifted to the Osawatomie facility, which has had to absorb the addition of 30 mental health beds.
Campbell noted the reopening may still depend on legislative appropriations, but said that if Sullivan can see it through, it will leave a lasting legacy.
"If this secretary can get this done, he will have accomplished something," Campbell said.
What happened? Federal regulators had looked at facilities like Rainbow and determined it didn't meet requirements to continue to operate. Rather than restore Rainbow to meet federal requirements so it could house 50 people (get that number?) They would instead turn it into a community based out service, with a maximum retention of 24 hours, before people would transition to a facility like Osawatomie. End result? Overcrowding.
This isn’t supposed to be happening. In January, Gov. Sam Brownback unveiled his administration’s plan to convert the state’s Rainbow Mental Health Facility in Kansas City, once a 50-bed inpatient hospital, to a privatized crisis stabilization center. The center would connect people with serious and persistent mental illnesses to community-based services, which are less expensive than state hospital care.
The reconfigured facility, now called Rainbow Services Inc., opened April 7. Three and a half months later, admissions at the Osawatomie hospital hit a 10-year high.
De Rocha said the two events — Rainbow’s configuration and the spike in admissions at Osawatomie — were unrelated.
http://www.khi.org/...
Multiple overtime shifts for staff.
Mentally ill patients stacked into the rooms in bunk beds, with two or three sharing a room at the same time.
Dining areas so crowded that they are elbow to elbow, and they are forced to utilize below standard staff in order to contain.
I've advised many a candidate to use this line this year, from the bible.. Ezekiel, 34:4
You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally.
How brutal is it that a state will look of those who need the most, and offer them the least. That we know that suffering occurs and provide flippant answers. That we wait for a disaster to happen - and if it does, we will say 'how could we have known'.
Families of children who face mental health disabilities must look at the future in Kansas and say: I cannot let this be the way business is done, not where my child lives, not where my family lives, and not where I live.