Mental health care in California will suffer a severe blow when the state’s Department of Mental Health’s proposed plan to overhaul its mental health care system is implemented in 2012, effectively eliminating over 600 positions (five percent of the workforce). This comprehensive revamping of the way care is provided for the mentally ill includes replacing the California Department of Mental Health with a new Department of State Hospitals which will reduce the budget by almost $195 million. With over 6000 state hospital and prison patients presently under the state’s mental health plan, Governor Jerry Brown wants to shift this burden away from the state and into the control of local management services by concentrating on only the most critically mentally ill patients.
Debate About the Proposal
photo credit: SamWebsyntax
According to details of the new plan, staff members would be responsible for assigning mentally ill patients to one of California’s five mental hospitals or one of two prison psychiatric programs, based on the severity of their illness. This committee, referred to as “Safety Now”, will be comprised of physicians, psychiatric technicians and pertinent state hospital employees. However, opponents of this plan say that by adopting this new committee, patient-to-staff ratio will be reduced by at least one-third.
Members of the opposition further reiterate the fact that over two million residents say they need mental health services but do not have access to the care they require due to an already overworked and understaffed system. They also point to results of a recent California Health Interview Survey in which nearly 90 percent of uninsured state residents needed mental health services but did not receive it. In addition, almost 80 percent of adults responding to this survey who had private insurance and needed mental health services could not access such care and 65 percent of those with Medicaid had unmet mental health needs.
Many who are unsettled by this proposed plan bring up worker safety conditions at prisons and state-run hospitals. For example, in 2010, a psychiatric technician named Donna Gross was killed at the Napa State Hospital by Jess Willard Massey, an individual with an extensive criminal history carrying a sentence of 25 years to life. Investigation of the murder resulted in the Division of Occupational Safety and Health fining Napa Hospital over $100,000 for six violations they say facilitated the death of Ms. Gross. Among these violations were inadequate police presence and lack of proper enforcement of safety procedures and policies.
Kathy Gaither, acting chief deputy director of the Department of Mental health says that this plan will save money but still maintain an optimal level of care for the mentally ill. However, the president of the Union of American Physicians and Dentists states otherwise. “We all know that if treatment staff are reduced,” says Stuart Bussey, president of the UAPD, “patient safety will almost surely deteriorate, resulting in an increase of assaults.”
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