(Cross-posted from The COFAR Blogsite)
In one of the few investigations of the community-based system of care for the developmentally disabled, the Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services last week disclosed critical shortcomings in the process in Massachusetts for reporting abuse and neglect.
A report issued by the IG found that incidents of abuse and neglect in group homes were not regularly reported to investigators. The report noted that of a sample of 587 visits by group home residents to hospital emergency rooms, the group homes had failed to report 88 –or 15 percent — of them to the Department of Developmental Services.
In addition, DDS itself and the group homes did not report 58 percent of 175 “critical incidents” to the Disabled Persons Protection Commission, as required by state regulations. And 29 percent of incident reports sampled by the IG did not contain “action steps” to protect individuals involved from future injury.
COFAR has long maintained that the state’s privatized group home system is inadequately overseen and prone to abuse and neglect due to relatively low levels of pay and training, and high turnover among staff. Even the providers themselves acknowledge those problems. Yet the state routinely relicenses the providers to operate homes even though there are clear gaps in the prevention and reporting of abuse and neglect.
The Massachusetts report is the third report issued by the HHS IG thus far on abuse and neglect in individual states. Last year, the IG issued a report on New York State; and in May, the agency issued a report on Connecticut.
U.S. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who originally requested in 2013 that the HHS IG investigate abuse and neglect in group homes around the country, commented this week on the findings, at least concerning Connecticut and Massachusetts. In a statement issued on Monday, Murphy said he will introduce federal legislation to require reporting of incidents of abuse and neglect, and training of direct care staff in group homes.
Murphy’s office did not respond to a request from COFAR earlier this year for comment on the New York report. As we noted in February, the New York report contained no recommendations and no critical findings, and was only six pages long.
The Massachusetts report, in contrast, was 33 pages long. Like the Massachusetts report, the Connecticut report, which was issued in May, found numerous failures to report abuse and neglect to state authorities.
Despite its thoroughness in examining the incident reporting process in Massachusetts, we believe even the IG’s Massachusetts report was limited in its scope. We think it could have gone much further in investigating the major problems posed by the privatized residential system.
In requesting the IG investigation, Murphy’s 2013 letter to Daniel Levinson, the HHS IG, emphasized the role of privatization in causing “a race to he bottom in our health care system. Privatization of care may mean lower costs but without the proper oversight and requirements for well-trained staff,” Murphy stated.
In limiting its report primarily to findings of failures to report instances of abuse and neglect, the IG has focused on a small piece of the overall problem. The larger issue concerns not only the level of abuse and neglect in the privatized system, but the overall adequacy of care that exists in it.
The HHS IG report did not examine the impact of privatization on the quality of care in the group home system, and did not specify whether the residents whose emergency room visits the IG sampled lived in privatized or state-run group homes.
We have found that the state’s ongoing privatization of residential services has resulted in a corporate, bottom-line approach to care of the disabled. Moreover, DDS has insisted on steering people waiting for residential care to the privatized group home system, all the while failing to provide state-run homes as an option.
The case of Kathleen Murphy is an example. As we have previously reported, Kathleen’s sister and guardian, Patricia Murphy, and members of her family began trying to move Kathleen from a corporate provider-operated group home to a state-operated residence in 1998. DDS continually declined to move her, despite a federal law requiring that the Department provide disabled individuals with a choice among all available alternatives for residential care.
Patricia Murphy finally filed a federal lawsuit in 2013, which resulted in the placement of Kathleen in a state-operated residence. (By way of disclosure, Kathleen Murphy is represented in the case by Tom Frain, who is COFAR’s Board president.)
Patricia Murphy contends that Kathleen suffered nearly 16 years of physical abuse, sexual assaults, emotional torment, and medical neglect in provider-operated group homes. She says her sister was also grossly over-drugged in those facilities, and her clothing, jewelry and spending money were stolen.
The state-operated residence to which Kathleen was finally placed is “the best thing that ever happened to her,” Patricia said. She said that since moving to the state-operated group home, Kathleen has lost 45 pounds, is being fed nutritious food, is off all psychotropic drugs, and her blood pressure is under control.
Yet these experiences as reported by families are apparently of little interest to the federal government, in particular, which, like the state, is committed to further privatization of residential services for the developmentally disabled. While the U.S. Department of Justice has placed a major emphasis in recent years on investigating and closing down state-operated facilities and services for the disabled, there have been few if any comprehensive investigations of the privatized group home system.
Unfortunately, the Massachusetts Legislature has adopted a look-the-other-way attitude regarding these problems. As far as we know, no legislative committee has scheduled any hearings in recent memory on the problem of abuse and neglect in the DDS system.
Both the Legislature and the Baker administration have continued a policy of boosting funding for further privatization of services while slowly starving the much more responsive state-run group home system of budgetary support.
We hope that the IG report, limited as it was, spurs the Legislature to finally pay attention to the big issues that surround the care of persons with developmental disabilities in Massachusetts. Those issues concern privatization and its impact on abuse, neglect, and the quality of care in general.
