By Chris Fitzsimon
Gov. Beverly Perdue has generally received good reviews for her first two weeks in office and deserves them, particularly for her executive orders on transportation and transparency, staying on top of the state’s budget woes and making a number of public appearances that reinforce her commitment to be an available, hands-on governor.
Perdue also dropped in on troubled Cherry Hospital in Goldsboro Friday (Jan. 23, 2009), part of her campaign pledge to make unannounced visits to state institutions as one way to increase accountability in the state mental health system.
But other news from the mental health front was a troubling reminder of the extent of the problems Perdue faces and how much credibility state officials have lost with the communities they’re supposed to serve.
The News & Observer reported Saturday that Cherry Hospital officials did not submit a report about the death of a patient in October to a medical examiner, as the state law required them to do. The law also mandates that the body cannot be moved without permission from a pathologist.
The patient, Kenneth Gore, was buried by the time the report finally made it to the state medical examiner’s office in Chapel Hill earlier this month, making an investigation of his death much harder to conduct.
Legislators and advocates were outraged by the latest problem at the hospital. Federal funding is still suspended because of patient care and unsafe conditions. The News & Observer has reported that hospital employees have falsified medical records to hide their culpability in patient deaths.
New Secretary of Health and Human Services Lanier Cansler promises to address the problems at the hospital, but those promises have been made before. And a decision last week by mental health officials in the department Cansler now runs about the mental health mess in northeastern North Carolina doesn’t help his credibility any.
The Albemarle local management entity (LME) is supposed to oversee services in 10 counties in the region, but was plagued by mismanagement and budget problems that led to the dismissal of director Charles Franklin. Eighty employees of the LME are being laid off, providers in the area haven’t been paid since September and many patients can’t access the services they need.
State officials finally stepped in and mental health director Leza Wainwright announced that Tom McDevitt, the former head of the Smoky Mountain Center LME in western North Carolina, would assume the leadership of the troubled Albemarle agency.
McDevitt resigned from the center in September after the Smoky Mountain News reported that McDevitt was paying himself two salaries totaling more than $200,000 a year, employing his daughter and conducting real estate deals with his wife’s company, along with other questionable conduct.
That seemed to make him an odd choice to take over the Albemarle agency that was sputtering because of problems with its director, but Wainwright persisted, telling local officials that the problems with McDevitt at Smoky Mountain were exaggerated and he simply was “not a good fit†for that LME.
That understandably made folks in northeastern North Carolina wonder then why he’d be a good fit to help run their agency. Wainwright announced Friday that she had changed her mind, that McDevitt would not run the Albemarle LME after all.
She told the Elizabeth City Daily Advance that it would be difficult for McDevitt with the “shadow that had been cast†by what happened at Smoky Mountain. That would be the same shadow that existed before she announced McDevitt’s appointment.
Folks in northeastern North Carolina must be wondering what’s going on in Raleigh. It seems like the last thing you would do to a community that was suffering because of mismanagement is to hire someone who resigned from his last job under an ethical cloud for poor judgment as a manager of a similar agency.
At least Wainwright finally figured it out, but the whole episode doesn’t help public confidence in the mental health system that the public hasn’t had much confidence in for a while.
If case that wasn’t enough, Hyde County Sheriff David Mason told the Daily Advance on Friday that from his perspective the state mental health system is “a total failure … and terrible is not even a word to describe it.â€
There is no reason to doubt Gov. Perdue’s sincerity about her commitment to finally address the problems with the troubled system that is supposed to care for people with a mental illness, developmental disability or addiction.
But the last few days are a powerful reminder that she has her work cut out for her.
Chris Fitzimon is the director of NC Policy Watch.