Calif. mental hospital workers protest conditions

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Dozens of California state workers gathered outside the gates of a Norwalk mental hospital Wednesday to protest repeated assaults at the hands of mental patients and what they called dangerous working conditions.

Metropolitan State Hospital employees say their workplace is as dangerous as Napa State Mental Hospital, where a nurse was killed last year, but the state hasn't done enough to improve safety at Metropolitan compared to efforts in the works at Napa.

Worker safety conditions have become a major point of contention between workers unions and the state's Department of Mental Health, which oversees mental hospitals.

A DMH spokesman said the agency shares the concerns of its workers and is hiring 78 positions focused on security and safety system-wide.

Fourteen of those positions will be new psychiatric technicians at Metropolitan to "patrol campus grounds to enhance the safety presence," Sean Tracy said. Metro will also get 10 new hospital police officers this year.

As the demonstration drew honks and chants outside Metropolitan State on Wednesday, Union of American Physicians and Dentists spokesman Jeff Duritz said staffers there are upset, in part, because they were left out of the $4.1 million budget allocation this year to buy a new personal alarm system for Napa State staffers.

"The problem is (DMH) didn't even ask for that funding for Metropolitan or Patton State Hospital," Duritz said. "(All state mental hospital staffers) work in these highly dangerous positions, but when DMH goes after a solution they do it at Napa but not at the other hospitals."

The state did allocate funds for a new emergency alarm system at Napa, but only after employees from the three hospitals attended a presentation to choose the new technology, Tracy said. The alarms are being tested at Napa to ensure they work before they're purchased and rolled out to other hospitals, he said.

According to state statistics, there was an average of 3.6 patient-on-staff assaults every day at Metropolitan State in 2010, compared with 2.5 such assaults daily at Napa State in the same period.

Last year, state workplace safety officials fined Napa State Hospital more than $100,000 in the October death of psychiatric technician Donna Gross, 54, and cited a lack of "adequate employee alarm systems" as a factor in her death.

The Division of Occupational Safety and Health citation also alleged "non-existent alarm systems outside the units, inadequate police presence in the event of assaults, and no enforcement of written policies and procedures by the employer."

Metropolitan staffers complain that their personal alarm systems have failed them, including Dr. Laura Dardashti, a psychiatrist at Metropolitan who rallied outside Wednesday.

When she first began working at the hospital in 2006, a patient lunged at Dardashti, snatching a file from her hand. She triggered her personal alarm but nothing happened as it was supposed to — no lights went off in the room, no sound came from her alarm and no other staffers were alerted to come to her aid.

Luckily, the patient stormed out of the room without assaulting Dardashti, but the experience left her shaken.

When she approached supervisors, they provided no remedy and seemed to accept the failing alarm system as "the way it is at Metro," Dardashti said.

"It was shocking to me to be at a facility where really there's this sort of acceptance of this lack of safety and security," she said.

Dardashti said there should be police inside the hospital's wards and staffing numbers should be based on how aggressive a unit's patients are, rather than the legal minimums.

Metropolitan State psychiatric technician Eric Soto protested outside his workplace Wednesday and agreed that staffing and personal alarms are an issue.

Tough patients are part of the job, and Soto said he can't count the number of times he's been punched, kicked, spat on or assaulted by patients at Metropolitan. There are things the state could do to make his job safer, including more liberal allowance of use of restraints, Soto said.

The 32-year-old has worked at the facility for the past 13 years, alongside a slew of family members, including two brothers, an aunt and an uncle. His mother used to work at Metropolitan until she was badly beaten by a patient in 2003, and has been medically retired ever since, Soto said.

"My mom is always worried about safety but we love our jobs, we love working with the patients," he said. "It's certainly not the conditions, and it's certainly not the pay that keeps us coming back day in and day out."