WASHINGTON (Map, News) - A “chaotic” staff and “inexcusable lapses” in patient care have cost 11 lives in St. Elizabeths mental hospital and threaten the lives of other inmates in the asylum, a new report found.

“The health and safety of the patients at St. Elizabeths Hospital are in jeopardy,” a nonprofit advocacy group said in a 33-page report. “In every single death, the medical records contain little or no evidence that the nursing staff at St. Elizabeths is performing basic, critical nursing functions.”

The report, titled “Patients in Peril,” is scheduled to be released today. Prepared by University Legal Services, a federally funded advocacy group for the mentally ill, it will be included in a federal court filing Thursday as part of ongoing litigation over the way the District of Columbia handles its mentally ill wards.

The 11 deaths at St. E’s in the last year it details are equal to the previous two years combined.

Mayor Adrian Fenty was an outspoken critic of the city’s mental health department during his election campaign in 2006.

But the report’s authors concluded that “the quality of medical services appears to have deteriorated further” on Fenty’s watch.

D.C. acting Attorney General Peter Nickles said he hadn’t studied the report, but its account of an indifferent bureaucracy was “inaccurate.”

“We investigate every death,” Nickles said. “When we find that staff fails the standard of care, we terminate them.” He called the report a “litigation tactic.”

The report features grim accounts of the last hours of the 11 patients who died while in St. Elizabeths’ care in 2007, including an unidentified man who was killed after an orderly tried to break up a fight by shoving him to the floor and sitting on him.

Among the dead was Elmer Randolph Jr., 54, who died of a twisted bowel on April 22, 2007. He had complained of abdominal pain the night before, but staff didn’t check on him, and he was found in his bed the next morning, already in a state of rigor mortis, the report found.

“They’ve come up with all kinds of different excuses,” Randolph’s father, Elmer Randolph Sr., told The Examiner.

For relatives of dead, the report has raised regrets.

“I wasn’t there for him as much as I could have been,” said Claretha Bettis, 57, a retired Library of Congress clerk whose brother, Monroe, died in St. E’s last year after what she says was months of neglect. “I wish I had enough money to put him into a private nursing home.”

The U.S. Department of Justice found similar chronic problems in a 2005 investigation of the District’s mental hospital.

Patient deaths

» 2004: Seven

» 2005: Seven

» 2006: Four

» 2007: 11

bmyers@dcexaminer.com

mneibauer@dcexaminer.com

Comments from Examiner Readers

4:41 AM MST on Mon., Jan. 14, 2008 re: "Report: St. Elizabeths patients in peril"

Examiner Reader said:
I think that it is irresponsible for this paper to call the patients at this facility "inmates". An immediate apology should be issued.

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9:46 PM MST on Thu., Jan. 10, 2008 re: "Report: St. Elizabeths patients in peril"

Kenneth Briggs said:
In 1989 I left DC's Mental Health Division having just completed the transfer of St. Elizabeth Hospital from the federal government to the DC government leaving behind great hopes for improved patient care. Since then I've lost touch. What in the world has happened?

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