OLYMPIA — A Centralia Republican state lawmaker has proposed bipartisan legislation that would spare individuals who have developmental disabilities but no medical need from being “warehoused and abandoned” in hospitals.
Sen. John Braun points to a recent case at Mason General Hospital in Shelton in which a mentally disabled man ended up being left at the hospital for three weeks although he had no medical condition.
Braun said the Developmental Disabilities Ombuds, an independent watchdog for issues concerning individuals with developmental disabilities, “has identified a pattern of mistreatment and neglect of adults with developmental disabilities — they can become stuck in a hospital, often for weeks or months, despite having no medical need requiring hospitalization.”
SB 5483 is sponsored by Sen. Karen Keiser, D-Kent, and Braun, who said the bill incorporates many of the Ombuds recommendations and is designed to address and alleviate the systemic issue.
“The problem is detrimental to the care of the individuals, whose mental health often declines while in this setting, as well as to the hospital, which neither gets reimbursed for the care provided nor whose staff are trained to properly care for the individual,” Braun said.
Mason General Hospital was forced to pay for the man’s stay at the hospital — more than $14,000, a doctor at the hospital said.
That doctor was John Short, an emergency medicine specialist at Mason General who documented the story of the man given the pseudonym, “Mason,” to protect his anonymity.
“This has been one of the strangest periods in my career,” Short said in his blog, “Stuck in the Hospital,” shortly after the man’s release from Mason General.
“I would have never thought that an agency as large as the DDA would shift responsibility to a small critical access hospital without a plan for compensation,” Short said.
Short said the man he called Mason was a DDA client who had been living in a licensed home for adults. He was removed from the home for aggressive behavior.
Braun criticized the DDA, saying the agency with a $3 billion annual budget and about 4,000 on staff did not know the scope of the problem and how long their clients are housed in hospitals without need for medical treatment.
