ATLANTA - The Department of Human Services should settle questions about the effects of privatizing mental health services before embarking on a plan that would shutter some hospitals and privatize others as soon as next year, a commission studying mental health services in Georgia has recommended.
Questions include the possible impact on rural regions of closing or drastically scaling back five of the state's seven psychiatric hospitals, according to a report by the Mental Health Service Delivery Commission. The report stopped short of condemning the plan, which has upset advocates worried that private entities aren't equipped to treat the mentally ill.
"The commission did not make a recommendation for or against privatization, we really didn't get much information," commission member Stan Jones told The Associated Press Wednesday. Jones said the department didn't share much information with the commission.
Faced with skyrocketing costs to maintain aging facilities, the department this month announced a plan that would close some hospitals, move some patients to others and direct many would-be hospital patients toward community based mental health care facilities.
The department could close its Savannah facility during fiscal 2009; officials are soliciting proposals to build new facilities in metro Atlanta and south-central Georgia to replace others closing there and in Rome.
A department spokeswoman didn't return calls from The Associated Press Thursday.
Critics have argued privatizing mental health services could shift the focus toward revenue rather than effective care.
Commission members raised their own concerns.
"While the Commission has not studied the issue of privatization thoroughly enough for endorsement, it has developed a list of critical questions to be answered," commission members said in the Dec. 4 report.
Those questions include how privatization would address the growing number of mentally ill in jails and what the alternative should be if privatization ends up being too expensive.
Gov. Sonny Perdue convened the commission in August 2007.
Georgia has seven mental hospitals ranging from 40 to 150 years old.
Officials have spent $70 million over the last six years to maintain facilities, with another $30 million in projected expenses by 2011.
They say there are no resources for the state to build new hospitals.
According to the plan, officials would close facilities through fiscal 2012, targeting regional hospitals in southwest and west central Georgia as well as the Savannah, Rome and Atlanta sites. A site in east central Georgia would operate in a reduced capacity.
New hospitals in central Georgia and metro Atlanta would take patients from across the state, at the same that time funds from shuttered hospitals would be poured into establishing community service providers. Inpatient child and adolescent programs would be turned over to those providers.
Department officials say the plan positions state hospitals to be used only after community options have been exhausted.
The plan would slash hospital beds for mental health patients across the state from 2,353 to 1,480 over the next few years.
Mental health care in Georgia is under scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Justice following a report in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealing at least 136 suspicious deaths and almost 200 confirmed cases of patient abuse since 2002.
This spring, the Justice Department sent a letter to Perdue demanding improvements to dangerous conditions at the state mental hospital in Atlanta.
The debate comes as mental health services are being targeted for budgets cuts amid slowing revenues.
Perdue in August announced plans to create a new agency to take the helm of Georgia's troubled mental health system.
It would essentially gut the department, a massive agency with 19,000 employees and a budget of $3.8 billion in federal and state dollars.
With that looming, public mental health providers like June DiPolito question why the department would undertake a major revamp.
"We're about to hopefully get a new department in July," said DiPolito, who heads Pineland Services, a community based mental health organization in Statesboro. "It would be better if we waited until that time ... when we could then bring all the stakeholders and parties involved together and make more thoughtful planning."
The Augusta Chronicle ©2012. All Rights Reserved.
