I had a broken heart reading these stories, but now it has been shattered:
"A ghoulish spectacle that alarmed even some Bridgewater staffers: a man completely immobilized for months on end, deprived of virtually any connection with others."
That's torture.
:-(
I hope you can now understand my animosity toward this one-party, "liberal Democrat" fa$ci$t state (in the truest $en$e of the word) we have here and all the illusion and imagery that comes with the conventional myths propagated by ma$$ media.
"Restraints cited in three deaths at Bridgewater; State hospital’s harsh patient care raises questions about health care provider" by Michael Rezendes | Globe Staff October 12, 2014
BRIDGEWATER — Bradley Burns let out a gut-wrenching howl as he lay strapped hand and foot to a small bed, his torso bound by a tightly wound sheet, his head and eyes covered with a helmet and goggles.
Burns had spent 23 hours a day like that — almost completely immobilized — for 16 months because medical staff at Bridgewater State Hospital felt it was the best way to prevent the sometimes-violent patient with paranoid schizophrenia from hurting himself, or others, as he had in the past. Even for visitors, he was placed in a tiny cell with barely enough room to stand or sit.
“It was like the cage with Hannibal Lecter,” his lawyer, Bernard Grossberg, recalled.
On this day, May 31, 2010, the care intended to protect the 34-year-old Burns may have killed him instead. Racked by excruciating back pain, he abruptly stopped breathing, likely because of a heart arrhythmia brought on by his medications and the restraints on his movement, the state medical examiner found.
His little-publicized death was anything but isolated at Bridgewater, the state’s prison for people with mental illness. Three years later, 45-year-old Paul Correia died from a blood clot that the medical examiner found was likely exacerbated by spending the better part of three days strapped to a bed.
That's, you know, I.... I.... I....
Did I mention Bridgewater as another of the massive and many failures of his tenure?
And both Burns and Correia died after another patient, Joshua K. Messier, 23, suffered heart failure as guards forcibly placed him in restraints, an encounter caught on surveillance video and ruled a homicide by the medical examiner. But rather than lead to reforms, Messier’s death was a harbinger of things to come.
A Globe review has found that after Messier’s death, the private company that provides medical and mental health care at Bridgewater approved the use of physical restraints with increasing frequency even as two more patients died. Meanwhile, other prisons were moving decisively away from the use of restraints to control agitated mental health patients.
But we are so much better than the rest of the rotten country. I was raised with that, and the Globe has only reinforced it.
Yet the questionable quality of care provided at Bridgewater by Virginia-based MHM Services did not prevent the company from winning a five-year contract to provide the same services across the state prison system in July 2013.
That's a $500 million contract they got.
**************
And the Massachusetts Partnership has remained in good standing with Department of Correction officials even as bad news about the company’s performance has mounted this year, including five consecutive state audits that found persistent problems in the way its staff cares for patients placed in isolation or restraints....
Is there really anything more to say about Massachusetts and its role in the Pri$on-Indu$trial Complex? That's why we have drug wars and stuff.
Nonetheless, prison officials have never used provisions in the Massachusetts Partnership’s contract that allows them to fine the company for failing to meet medical and mental health standards.
Who is government looking out for again?
The state had issued nearly $1 million in fines through June for failures to meet prison staffing requirements, but even there, correction officials have agreed to waive almost $400,000 of the penalties.
“They have a stick but they’re just not using it, for whatever reason,” said Lawrence Weiner, a former Department of Correction official who said he was fired a year ago after clashing with agency officials over efforts to make the Massachusetts Partnership comply with the terms of its contract. “And without the fiscal penalties there’s really no incentive for the vendors to correct problems.”
The stick is only for you, citizen.
In a statement, department officials insisted they have “set clear expectations for MPCH . . . and put in place a number of specific performance measures that align with our high standards and hold our vendor accountable, when necessary.”
I don't know about you, but I am sick of authoritative spew from AmeriKan in$titutions.
Massachusetts Partnership officials declined to be interviewed, citing ongoing litigation and the need to protect patient privacy. But the company issued a general statement strongly defending its work at Bridgewater....
Steven H. Wheeler, the chief executive officer at the Massachusetts Partnership for Correctional Health, formed by MHM and St. Louis-based Centene Corp., and president of MHM Services, pointed out that the 325-bed medium-security prison is the only one in the state that accepts mentally ill patients that require “strict custody,” with many of them presenting “very complex and challenging mental health, medical, legal, and situational issues.” Burns, for instance, had strangled another inmate during a psychotic episode shortly after being admitted.
Then he deserved to die, and you know what? Let's just execute them all and have done with it. No need to keep these people around. That will solve the problem. Just costing us money anyway.
I mean, murder is so complex. It's not a crime when the state or those they hire do it.
Despite the challenges, Wheeler said, Bridgewater’s staff is making enormous progress in reducing the use of isolation rooms and physical restraints. The staff has cut its use of restraints by 90 percent this year, Wheeler said.
You know, we have been making progress all over the place, with the wars, economy, and everything, and yet things still get worse. In fact, the treatment got worse in the face of.... oh, never mind constantly responding to shit-shoveling authority. It's a turd of a lie every time they open their mouths and I open a new$paper.
But the recent changes at Bridgewater — and Governor Deval L. Patrick’s proposed reforms, including increasing its clinical staff — are small consolation to the families of Messier, Burns, and Correia, who complain that Bridgewater officials have treated them with indifference.
You know who they are truly looking out for, right?
Not one of the families has received a formal apology, for example.
Not even an apology from the most liberal and compassionate state in the nation? I $uppose that would be admitting legal guilt, and we can't have that.
And Bridgewater officials have yet to respond to a recent letter from John and Margaret Burns asking for records related to their son’s death, or to a similar letter from Carmela Correia, Paul Correia’s 73-year-old widowed mother.
************
‘He was seeing spiders’
Bradley Burns was already a patient at Bridgewater State Hospital in 2009 when Joshua Messier died while strapped to a bed, his face turning blue as guards stood by idly for several minutes. The first two nurses on the scene weren’t much help either, both leaving Messier’s cell without administering CPR, surveillance video shows.
But the fiasco brought no change in Burns’ 23-hour-a-day confinement to a bed in five-point restraints. The correction commissioner at the time, Harold W. Clarke, rejected the medical examiner’s finding that Messier was a victim of homicide, and no one was disciplined despite video showing guards roughly handling Messier, and an investigation by the Disabled Persons Protection Commission that found two guards were responsible for Messier’s death.
Indeed, over the next five years, Bridgewater clinicians employed physical restraints on inmates even more frequently, records show.
Really, what more is there to say?
MHM clinicians never came up with an effective treatment plan for Burns, a Northeastern University honors graduate who had owned two physical therapy clinics and drove a BMW before schizophrenia left him beset by delusions and auditory hallucinations that sometimes caused him to lash out violently.
Wow, this guy was an important person, not rabble scum like the rest of us, and was treated that way by our elite rulers.
Of course, when such things are needed to promote wars they are plastered all over the place in the propaganda pre$$. Think about that for a minute, the delusions and illusions pushed by the pre$$ to start wars, and how it is not very different at all. Just a bigger band of psychopaths in good-looking suits roaming free. Only difference.
While at Bridgewater for a psychiatric evaluation after a 2004 hostage-taking incident at a McDonald’s restaurant, Burns became convinced that a fellow patient posed a mortal threat to him, and strangled him with a T-shirt.
“He said he was seeing spiders on the other inmate,” said Grossberg, Burns’s attorney. “That’s what you call a paranoid schizophrenic, a true one.”
For more than a year, clinicians and prison guards kept Burns in solitary confinement, allowing visits from doctors and nurses, his parents, and his lawyer.
Eventually, clinicians allowed Burns to mingle with other patients on a limited basis. But by 2008, Burns began hearing voices more frequently and appeared intent on taking his own life, often diving from the top of pieces of furniture headfirst onto the floor.
In 2009, after Burns tried to gouge out his own eyes, staffers isolated him more aggressively. Doctors ordered him held in five-point restraints, with protective head, eye, and hand gear. Eventually, they refused to let friends see him, and limited his parents to one-hour visits. Though Burns was initially provided with reading materials and allowed to listen to the radio, his parents and his attorney said even those privileges were soon withdrawn.
The result was a ghoulish spectacle that alarmed even some Bridgewater staffers: a man completely immobilized for months on end, deprived of virtually any connection with others.
Stuart Grassian, a Newton psychiatrist and an expert in the use of isolation in prisons, said he had never heard of an inmate or patient being immobilized 23 hours a day with so little access to the outside world.
“There is no explanation for depriving him of these things other than that it was punitive,” said Grassian. “It feels almost medieval.”
Medieval Massachusetts. I'm so ashamed, yet I shouldn't be.
Even though Burns was a difficult patient, convinced that the CIA was controlling his mind, Grassian said, clinicians should have done more to engage him in activities that would distract him from his delusions and the voices in his head, and connect him with reality.
Well, they have done research on it all the way back to the 1950s. Just crazy if you even question such a thing, huh?
Turns out it doesn't work very well, and some are even immune. Thus the fall-back becomes the propaganda pre$$ and its increasing inability to mold minds.
“Without that, it would perhaps be impossible for him to recover, no matter what medication they were giving him,” he said.
Dr. Kevin M. Monahan, a Boston Medical Center cardiologist interviewed by the Globe, said that the clozapine prescribed to Burns as well as his long hours completely immobilized in restraints could have increased the chances that he would suffer an irregular heartbeat, which the medical examiner concluded was the most likely cause of his death.
Monahan also said that restraints, in and of themselves, can cause stress, leading to elevated heart rates and blood pressure, particularly when a patient is agitated, and that this stress may trigger other, previously undiagnosed risk factors.
“If you’re putting someone in restraints, that’s a big physical stress on the body, and these undiagnosed problems may well come to light,” he said.
It’s difficult to tell whether Burns could have been saved the morning he died, in part because Bridgewater officials never conducted a mandatory review in which a panel of clinicians, usually including an outside expert, would have studied the circumstances surrounding his death.
But one analysis filed with a private organization that accredits health care facilities shows that the emergency response when Burns lost consciousness was flawed.
No offense, and I know humans are not perfect and government is far from it; however, I'm tired of all their "flaws" at the tax loot rolls up the economic ladder. I'm sick of goddamn exudes after having paid throughout the tax nose for all this!
Department officials admit in the analysis that the response by staff was uncoordinated and inefficient, and that necessary “medical equipment was not at bedside.” It also noted that on-site emergency response training for staff had been canceled, without further explanation.
Budget cuts, no doubt!
Margaret and John Burns said that, more than four years after their son’s death, they remain confounded by the actions of Bridgewater prison officials and the treatment provided to their son by Bridgewater doctors and nurses.
“In this day and age, why did our son have to suffer so much?” Margaret Burns said.
‘He would not have died’
When Paul Correia arrived at Bridgewater State Hospital on a Friday evening in August of 2013, the schizophrenia patient was screaming, threatening prison guards, and refusing to leave the van that had moved him from the Bristol County House of Correction.
Three days earlier, Correia had suffered a broken nose and other injuries during a fight with Westport police following a traffic accident — injuries that, along with his obvious obesity, put him at increased risk for blood clots if he were to be immobilized.
For the last several years of his life, Correia, whose mental illness made it difficult for him to hold a job, had lived with his mother and his beloved Spotty, a white American bulldog with a large black patch splashed across his right eye. When he wasn’t listening to heavy metal music in his basement bedroom, Correia would spend hours in the garage, lovingly restoring a vintage Chevrolet Chevelle SS.
Think there is a connection?
But the voices that often intrude into the minds of men and women afflicted with schizophrenia would always return, often leading to violent outbursts involving members of his extended family, suicide attempts, visits from the police, and trips to the nearby Corrigan Mental Health Center in Fall River.
“Whatever the voices told him to do, he did it,” his mother, Carmela Correia, recalled.
She last saw her son while sitting in the front row at Fall River District Court five days before his death, as he repeatedly interrupted the judge during his bail hearing on motor vehicle violations and charges of assaulting police officers following his accident, which apparently began with his psychotic episode.
The judge ordered Paul Correia, who arrived shirtless, held on $2,000 bail, which his mother was not prepared to pay on short notice, a fact that still haunts her.
“If I knew I had to have the money, my son would be alive today,” she said.
At the Bristol County House of Correction, Correia refused to take antipsychotic medications and his mental health deteriorated, until officials brought him before a second judge, who sent him to Bridgewater State Hospital.
I can't say I blame him for not wanting to take those pre$cription pharmaceuticals.
When Correia arrived, a Massachusetts Partnership doctor immediately ordered guards to take Correia to a cell and place him in four-point restraints, strapping his wrists and ankles to a bed....
By Monday morning, on Aug. 26, 2013, Correia was dead.
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Partnership’s state contract
Less than two months before Correia died, the Massachusetts Partnership took over medical and mental health services for the entire Massachusetts prison system. It was the only company that proposed providing both medical and mental health care for the 10,500 inmates at the state’s 18 facilities.
The company was the low bidder, which was a key factor in the contract award, according to a Correction Department memo obtained by the Globe from Prisoners’ Legal Services, a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of state prison inmates.
The department also believed that the Massachusetts Partnership would continue to reap cost-saving efficiencies because it was taking on both medical and mental health responsibilities, and because its parent companies, MHM and Centene Corp., each have experience providing health care to the uninsured and underinsured.
That's all government cares about these days: MONEY!
How they can get it out of your pocket and put it into their own!!!!!!!!!!
Related: Cost of film tax credit: $78.9 million
In 2012 alone! Is that cost efficient, tax loot going to profitable Hollywood -- or SOMEWHERE ELSE?
“Through this partnership, MPCH will have the ability to bring sophisticated health care management systems that are currently being used in the community and apply them to the prison setting,” said Weiner, the former department official, in the memo.
That is such an out-of-touch and dispassionate view of things.
Bureaucrat!
But the audits of the Massachusetts Partnership’s recent performance at Bridgewater — which found poor quality medical care and the questionable use of restraints and seclusion — and the fines levied by the Correction Department for failing to meet staffing requirements raise questions about how well the company is meeting the terms of the five-year contract.
Not enough to keep them from another contract!
And advocates for the inmates say the quality of care has been a disappointment....
It's been more than that.
--more--"
Also see: Bridgewater All Better
Uh-huh.
