The city of Los Angeles is pursuing a criminal investigation of a psychiatric hospital in Las Vegas, which has allegedly put 1,500 patients on buses and sent them out of state over the past five years.
About one third of these patients, some of which were homeless,
were given one-way bus tickets to cities in California. About 200
of the 1,500 mentally ill patients were sent to Los Angeles County,
150 of whom arrived in downtown L.A. Since 2008, patients were
bused to cities in every continental US state, even though some had
no family, friends or housing at their destination. After the
Sacramento Bee published an exposé on the dumping practices of the
Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital, the city of Los Angeles announced
it would launch a probe investigating the matter.
“It’s just an abhorrent practice,” Gil Cedhillo, a
candidate for the L.A. City Council and a former state senator,
told the Bee. “You can’t just take someone from a facility and
dump them downtown.”
L.A. has one of the strictest patient-dumping laws in the US,
which was adopted in 2007 after a homeless schizophrenic was found
walking the streets in his hospital gown while still connected to a
catheter bag.
The Bee obtained bus receipts from the Nevada Division of Mental
Health and Developmental Services and found that the hospital sent
its patients away on Greyhound buses, equipped with a small supply
of medication and several bottles of a nutritional supplement that
only lasted a few days.
Health officials claim that most of the patients were sent off
to cities where they had a place to stay, but the Bee discovered
several cases in which mentally ill patients were forced to go to
cities that they had no connection to.
James Flavy Coy Brown, a 48-year-old homeless man who had
received treatment at Rawson-Neal, was put on a bus that dropped
him off in Sacramento — even though he had never been there and
knew no one in the city.
The former psychosis patient had only been treated for three
days before doctors sent him out of state, despite his
protests.
“I said, ‘I don’t want to leave Nevada,’” Brown told ABC
News. “[The doctor] said, ‘California sounds like a really nice
state. I think you’ll be happy there.’”
Equipped with a $306 one-way bus ticket, six Ensure nutrition
shake bottles, and a three-day supply of psychiatric medications,
he was sent away, only to end up on the streets of Sacramento —
without medication. The man had no Social Security card, food stamp
card or Medicaid card, and checked into a homeless shelter, feeling
the effects of medication withdrawal and the return of his
psychosis.
“If I don’t take my medicine, I get really confused and I
start hearing voices in my head, and they tell me to, like, jump
off a bridge or to do something to purposefully get arrested or go
to prison or jail,” he said.
The Bee claims that as a result of its initial exposé last
month, the hospital modified its procedures to require dispatched
patients to be accompanied by a chaperone when bused out of
state. In response to the investigations, Nevada Gov. Brian
Sandoval also said that state officials have implemented a new
policy that requires at least two physicians and a hospital
administrator to approve a dispatch order — rather than just one
physician.
Still, the Joint Commission, an independent agency that
certifies US hospitals, is considering pulling Rawson-Neal’s
accreditation for its history of patient-dumping. The city
attorneys in L.A. and San Francisco have also launched probes into
the hospital’s practices. If the allegations are true, Rawson-Neal
would lose federal funding and face steep financial penalties.
L.A. City Attorney Carmen Trutanich and his team are currently
scouting out former patients to see if they were released in
violation of the city’s ordinance against patient-dumping.
“This is 150 people allegedly on the streets of L.A.,”
Trutanich said, referencing the number of mentally ill patients
that the hospital sent to the city. “We’re already stretched as
it is.”
But if Rawson-Neal is found guilty, the hospital could be
convicted of a criminal misdemeanor and charged a hefty fine.
This article originally appeared on : RT