Bridgewater State Hospital is extra like a jail than a psychological well being hospital, lawmakers are being informed.
Members of the Legislature’s Justice Reform Caucus stated as it’s at present run and managed by contractors for the state Department of Correction, the state hospital is extra akin to the jails the division’s crews are educated to function.
“It doesn’t feel like a hospital at all, it feels like a prison,” state Rep. Mary Keefe stated.
Bridgewater State Hospital homes tons of of males, all exhibiting extreme psychological sicknesses, many however not all of whom have been convicted of crimes.
Legislation supplied by state Rep. Ruth Balser, H2985 or An Act transferring Bridgewater State Hospital from the Department of Correction to the Department of Mental Health, would do precisely as its identify suggests and switch Bridgewater from the DOC to DMH, the place the employees has experience within the care of these with psychological sickness.
“This bill is so important because the people who are at Bridgewater State Hospital really need mental healthcare. At the risk of stating the obvious, the Department of Mental Health is the mental health authority for the state and it’s they that should have oversight and responsibility for people who are severely mentally ill,” Balser, a training scientific psychologist, informed her colleagues.
According to the Disability Law Center’s Director of Litigation, Tatum Pritchard, her group has been monitoring actions at Bridgewater for greater than a decade. In that point, certainly within the final yr, they’ve seen a sample of sufferers being handled with the form of regard which might not be permitted on the state’s precise psychological well being services.
“One static condition impacts everything that happens inside the facility negatively, that Bridgewater is a prison, run by the Department of Correction, and is not a hospital. Maintaining this status quo is a blight on the Commonwealth’s reputation as a forward thinking and forward acting state,” Pritchard stated.
According to Pritchard, the power is just not really an accredited hospital to start with, regardless of being known as one and housing sick folks. The corrections employees, educated to count on full compliance with the folks below their cost, usually get poor responses when coping with the very unwell, Pritchard stated. Rules that the psychological well being groups must regard to guard sick folks don’t apply to corrections employees, she stated.
“One of the most concerning examples of disparate treatment between Bridgewater and DMH facilities, are Bridgewater’s involuntary medication practices, which plainly Massachusetts law governing the use of restraint and seclusion,” she stated.
Sick sufferers are approached of their cells by employees behind riot shields, Pritchard stated, surrounded, compelled to the bottom and restrained, after which injected with antipsychotic medicine. In the final six months, greater than 200 compelled medicines have occured on the hospital, she stated.
“That is how we administer emergency treatment in this so-called state hospital,” she stated.
The Department of Corrections and Wellpath, the contractor that runs the hospital on behalf of the division, didn’t return a request for remark by press time.
Balser’s invoice and an similar provide made by state Sen. Cynthia Stone Creem had been heard by the Joint Committee on State Administration and Regulatory Oversight in July however haven’t left that physique.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”