Georgia reaches agreement with feds

Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue announced yesterday that his state has reached an agreement with the Justice Department to overhaul patient care seven state psychiatric hospitals.
The agreement, which still needs judicial approval, covers almost every area of patient care:

• Incident reviews and investigations
• Treatment planning
• Seclusion and restraint protocols
• Medical and nursing care
• Discharge planning

The tentative agreement also calls for the state to develop new suicide risk assessment tools to prevent patient suicides. They are also to examine approaches to deter assaultive behavior.
As discussed on this blog, Georgia has been under intense scrutiny after an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation uncovered 136 deaths and nearly 200 cases of patient abuse since 2002. Recently, the state has been exploring privatizing its crumbling public psychiatric hospital system.Sphere: Related Content
Read more...

Update on Georgia's Mental Health Makeover

As discussed previously on this blog, Georgia officials are considering turning their state's mental health system over to the private sector (see "Georgia Edges Toward Eliminating Public Psychiatric Hospitals," Dec. 11, 2008). Since then, Gwen Skinner, director of the state's Division of Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities and Addictive Diseases, announced she will be leaving the troubled agency come this fall.
Today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution featured a thought-provoking opinion piece authored by Dr. Branko Radulovacki, a clinical psychiatrist and Program Director of the Adult Psychiatric Partial Hospitalization Program at the Ridgeview Institute. He rightly proposes that instead of looking to for-profit companies to run Georgia's psychiatric hospitals, the state's mentally ill would be far better served if non-profit hospitals took them over instead.Sphere: Related Content
Read more...