From the [UK] Guardian, [UK] Daily Mail, BBC, [UK] Daily Mail:

A hospital in South West London that allowed a 43-year-old man with Down syndrome to starve to death in its care has apologized to his family for the man’s “inexcusable” treatment.

Martin Ryan (left) had a stroke in 2005 which left him unable to swallow. He was not fitted with a feeding tube, and died after being without food or water for 26 days.

With a government ombudsman expected to rule on the case later this month, the disability charity Mencap called on the government to condemn the failings of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) in caring for people with learning disabilities.

Mencap highlighted Ryan’s case and five others in a March 2007 report called Death By Indifference. The charity said the six cases demonstrated that there was institutional discrimination within the NHS against people with learning disabilities.

(Photo from the [UK] Daily Mail)

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See also an op-ed by columnist Deborah Orr in the [UK] Independent: The shocking price to be paid by those not perfect enough to be treated

An excerpt:

… Despite all the evidence to the contrary over many years, the medical profession is highly resistant to the idea that there is institutional discrimination against disabled people within the health service.

Sadly, for the parents of children with disabilities, this is quite obvious. What haunts many of them, as they struggle to provide care for the children, is what will happen when they are no longer around to provide advocacy. These paralyzing fears, it is now perfectly obvious, are well founded.

Earlier story:

Disabled ‘face suffering in NHS’ — BBC, July 29, 2008 – Independent inquiry calls for inspections, more training in wake of Mencap report

From AP/Washington Post:

Mental patients sprinkled throughout the nation’s psychiatric hospitals are being locked up alone for years despite laws aimed at preventing the practice, because medical workers say they’re too dangerous to handle any other way.

Health officials call them outliers — rare, unpredictably violent people who don’t respond to medication or other treatment. Advocates call them victims of a system that has lost patience and creativity in caring for those who are most difficult to treat.

The Associated Press found at least a dozen patients in various states who were held in seclusion for months or years at a time, including some who were tethered or strapped down for more than a year.

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

In the wake of reports of widespread abuse and neglect of people in state mental hospitals, the Georgia legislature this year voted to create an independent authority to investigate and resolve complaints.

Funding for the mental health ombudsman now appears to have evaporated in the state’s budget crisis, leaving patients and families with virtually no way to address problems.

The ombudsman program had been approved following a series of articles in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that documented 136 suspicious deaths in Georgia’s seven state-run mental hospitals from 2002 to 2007. An investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice is ongoing.

The state’s budget shortfall stands at more than $1.6 billion. The pricetag on the ombudsman program is $250,000.

See earlier posts here, here, and here.

From the New York Times:

In a story about the haphazard way in which the American health care system handles cases involving uninsured immigrants, the New York Times documents efforts by an Arizona hospital to deport a baby with Down syndrome and a heart problem to Mexico against his parents’ wishes. The baby, Elliott Bustamente, was an American citizen born at University Medical Center in Tucson.

A hospital spokeswoman said the hospital believed Elliott’s parents to be residents of Mexico, and therefore decided to transfer him to his “community of residence” for continuing care. The baby’s parents challenged the decision through the Mexican consulate, a lawyer and the police. Eventually, after the Arizona Medicaid system approved the baby for coverage, the hospital dropped its effort to send him to Mexico.

“The medical pretext for the transfer disappeared once they found the money,” said Fernando Gaxiola, the family’s lawyer.

Other stories include a legal immigrant from Mexico  who was sent across the border by a Phoenix hospital, a man from China who had a stroke and is being cared for in a Manhattan hospital, and an Oklahoma City hospital that discharged a brain-injured patient from Honduras to a relative who was ill-equipped to care for him. Hospitals see themselves as stranded at the crossroads of a failed immigration policy and a failed health care system.

Writing in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Atlanta resident Susan Haines says she sympathizes with Tysheema Brown, a Georgia woman who dropped off her 12-year-old son with behavioral issues at a hospital in Nebraska under the “safe haven law.” The controversial law allows parents to drop off children as old as 17.

Haines says parents of children with special needs often feel “thwarted by local and state bureaucratic roadblocks and indifference” that leave them desperate with nowhere to turn.

An excerpt:

We understand Brown’s heart-rending dilemma and support what she saw as her only option. Her love of her child is so strong that she was willing to make this choice. I am outraged that the state of Georgia has countermanded her legal right as a parent. When a parent or surrogate has advocated to the limit of his or her ability, Georgia offers nothing but a cold shoulder.

From the [Newark] Star-Ledger:

More than one-third of people with autism and other developmental disabilities may also have mental illness, said a report by a New Jersey task force.

It called on hospitals and community service agencies to improve care for these people, and urged cross-training professionals in mental health and developmental disabilities fields. The state’s human services commissioner said the report will help the state prevent disabled people from being wrongly institutionalized.

By Alan Judd and Andy Miller in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Georgia is preparing to turn over the management of much of its beleaguered mental health care system to for-profit companies, even though similar private programs in other states haven’t demonstrated that they could save money or improve care.

According to public documents obtained by the AJC, the state plans to privatize at least one of its seven psychiatric hospitals by next year and turn over management for sections of others. Plans also call for expanding community services.

A Florida state auditing agency found that privatization resulted in little or no improvement in patient outcomes or cost savings. North Carolina has wasted up to $400 million on funding unqualified private firms, according to state audits and news reports, and Pennsylvania has shelved plans after questions about the impact on hospital employees and cost savings emerged.

“Oh, man – have they not been looking at what problems we’ve had?” said Debra Dihoff, executive director of North Carolina’s chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “I can’t believe they would use us as a model.”

See previous posts here and here and here.