State deal pledges better care at Bridgewater Hospital after three deaths, and threats of lawsuits

From a report in the Boston Globe

Many more details at the link

An independent monitoring group will open an office inside troubled Bridgewater State Hospital for the next two years to make sure that prison guards and clinicians continue reducing their use of isolation and physical restraints on mentally ill patients, under a deal with the state that averts a lawsuit.

“The agreement guarantees that over the next couple of years, someone will be in there watching, looking at the data, talking to the patients and staff, and really trying to make sure that people are treated appropriately as patients and not as prisoners,” Christine M. Griffin, the executive director of the federally funded Disability Law Center, which reached the agreement with the Patrick administration, said Tuesday.

The center had threatened to sue Massachusetts for what it said were widespread human rights abuses at Bridgewater, where the Globe has identified three deaths in recent years related to the use of restraints to control patients.

Under the agreement worked out over the last five months with Governor Deval Patrick, the center will not sue as long as the state follows through on a host of promises of better care, including a plan to move most of the patients to a proposed facility at an undetermined location to be run by the Department of Mental Health.

[...]

The Disability Law Center launched a six-week, on-site investigation into practices at Bridgewater after a series of stories in the Globe, including a detailed account of the death of Joshua K. Messier, a 23-year-old mental health patient sent to Bridgewater for a psychiatric evaluation who died as guards wrestled him into four-point restraints, cuffing his wrists and ankles to a small bed.

[...]

A more recent Globe story recounted the deaths of two more mental health patients — Bradley Burns and Paul Correia — whose deaths were attributed by the state medical examiner’s office to the use of restraints. Burns was held in five-point restraints for 16 months, 23 hours a day, before he died of a heart arrhythmia.

Under the agreement with the Disability Law Center, the administration has pledged to discontinue the use of five-point restraints — strapping a patient down by chest, wrists, and ankles — altogether and to revise its official policy on the use of seclusion and restraints by mid-January.

Meanwhile, Bridgewater State Hospital officials have replaced existing restraint beds with larger, more comfortable beds, and cut the overall use of restraints by 86 percent and the use of seclusion by 68 percent, since January, according to the Department of Correction.