The state health department would take over inspections, an outside panel would monitor conditions, and workers would be legally required to report mistreatment in a bill born of the patient-abuse scandal at the maximum-security Whiting forensic facility.
The measures would be a first step in changing a culture behind Whiting’s walls — a climate that tolerated what amounted to the torture of patient William Shehadi, the patient’s brother, Albert Shehadi, said in remarks prepared for the legislature’s public health committee at a hearing Friday.
Most of the patients at Whiting are either being evaluated to see if they can stand trial or have been acquitted of criminal charges by reason of insanity.
Mental Health Commissioner Miriam Delphin-Rittmon testified Friday that she is trying “to change the environment” at the psychiatric hospital in Middletown by adding managers, opening new lines of communication for staff members and increasing training. But many legislators and advocates were stunned and enraged that unprovoked abuse of a patient could go on for weeks, and play out on video monitors at the nurse’s station and other locations, and go undetected until a whistleblower came forward.
Whiting is hampered by a “one-size-fits-all treatment” regimen, has a staff that is “inadequately trained” and management “that is largely absent outside of daytime shifts,” Albert Shehadi said.
“There are no internal controls,” said Shehadi, who lives in Greenwich and is the chief lending officer at a health care capital firm in New York City.
The outside panel or task force contemplated in the bill should have subpoena power so it can go after internal records and compel testimony, said one of the bill’s architects, Sen. Heather Somers, a Republican of Groton, and co-chairwoman of the public health committee.
She said that while the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services requires patient-care workers to report abuse, they are not included in the group of professionals — teachers, police officers, doctors, nurses, social workers — that could face criminal prosecution if they fail to report suspected abuse or neglect. The bill would put forensic-treatment workers and some other Whiting employees into that category, Somers said.
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy earlier this year signed an executive order separating Whiting from the rest of the campus at Connecticut Valley Hospital. Under the bill discussed Friday, Whiting would officially become a hospital, and it would be licensed and inspected by the state Department of Public Health.
The agency would conduct unannounced visits whenever a complaint was received, Health Commissioner Raul Pino told the legislative committee.
When legislators noted that problems can occur on all shifts, Pino said his inspectors would come at odd hours, including weekends and late at night, and not confine themselves to the day shift when most of the Whiting bosses are around.