AUGUSTA, Maine - The court master in the ongoing consent decree covering mental health services at the Riverview Psychiatric Center says the Department of Health and Human Services has stopped admitting patients in violation of the decree. And former Chief Justice of the Maine Supreme Court Dan Wathen wants the department to start admitting patients again as soon as possible.
In a filing with the Superior Court in Kennebec County, Wathen says Riverview stopped accepting new patients at the forensic units in March. He says up to that point the Center had been doing a good job keeping up with demand, but as of last week, there were 30 vacant beds out of the 92 bed capacity. Wathen says there are more than 30 patients waiting in jails, hospital emergency departments and community psychiatric hospitals for placement at Riverview.
"Eleven or twelve days in an emergency department in a room with no window is not a place where a person with serious and persistent mental illness should be held," Wathen says.
Wathen says he supported the request by DHHS for additional staff at Riverview that was approved in an emergency spending bill passed by lawmakers last month. But, he says, the department is reporting that it has not been able to fill vacancies in the existing staff at the Center, let alone fill the new ones just created.
"At this point it looks as though there isn’t any prospect that there is going to be any job after July 1, so that they haven’t filled those positions because it’s not a very tempting situation," Wathen says.
But the leaders of the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee say they would not have added the positions in the emergency budget if they did not intend to carry the positions through the two-year state budget. They say they simply have not yet progressed far enough in budget negotiations to take a formal vote on that part of the DHHS budget.
Attempts to reach DHHS Commissioner Mary Mayhew on Wathen’s court filing were unsuccessful.
