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LA Times & ProPublica: Psychiatric care's peril and profits
Thank you Christina and Robin for doing such remarkably well thought out research. Your work was both extensive, eye opening, and right on target.
ProPublica Multimedia and Additional Stories
Peter DaSilva / For The Times
Carrie Thomas comforts her mother, Vickie Burton, whose husband, Steven, died after checking into a Sacramento hospital for treatment of alcohol abuse and depression.
Psychiatric Care’s Peril and Profits
Lapses at Psychiatric Solutions Inc., a major hospital chain with high earnings, have put patients at risk, regulators find. Some have even died.
By Christina Jewett and Robin Fields, ProPublica Staff Writers
November 23, 2008
Psychiatric Solutions Inc. was on its way to becoming the nation’s leading provider of private psychiatric care when it snapped up Sierra Vista Hospital in Sacramento in mid-2005.
The company put its well-honed business formula into action: Staffing fell. Beds filled up. Profits soared.
It was a winning strategy for investors. But for some patients, federal records show, checking into Sierra Vista proved dangerous – at times deadly.
In December 2005, Ramona Knapp, 51, was left fatally brain damaged after hospital workers restrained her improperly, pinning her to the floor.
In March 2007, an unidentified 29-year-old woman was mistakenly given six times the prescribed dose of a potent antipsychotic drug. Even after 15 hours, she was too weak to swallow.
When Steven Burton, 55, checked in for treatment of alcohol abuse and depression in February, he complained of chest pains. The intake nurse didn’t notify a doctor because, as she later told regulators, “he didn’t look sick.”
Burton was discovered the next morning, facedown on the floor of his room, shaking and sweating. Staffers put him back in bed and paged a psychiatrist, getting no response. Two and a half hours later, a nurse found him blue and not breathing.
Burton, an El Dorado County agriculture official, came to Sierra Vista only at the insistence of his wife, Vickie.
“The last thing I was thinking,” she said, “was that I was taking him to the place where he was going to die.”
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