The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) announced on September 11, 2008 that,
effective September 1, Cherry Hospital had been decertified as a Medicare and Medicaid provider by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
An Aug. 13 survey investigating complaints concerning patient abuse and safety determined the hospital
was not in compliance with CMS standards of participation. A full survey conducted Aug. 26-31 concluded
that Cherry Hospital was still out of compliance with patient health and safety standards.
Citing a federal investigator's report, the North Carolina News & Observer, Aug 19, 2008 said,
Nurses at the state's mental hospital in Goldsboro walked past a patient sitting in a chair for more than 22 hours without giving him food or helping him to the bathroom before he died.
April 28 footage from a hospital security cameras shows a health care technician attempting to revive Sabbock by means of "abdominal thrusts", after he choked on his medicine, fell backwards, and banged his head against the floor. A nurse was standing by, but offered no assistance.
In mid-August DHHS claimed to have implemented new training programs to fix the type of problems that lead to Sabbock's death; but even after those programs began additional problems surfaced.
According to the North Carolina News & Observer, Aug 28, 2008,
Cherry Hospital fired three employees Wednesday and told a part-timer not to come back to work, after the beating of a patient . . .
Two of the fired employees were health care technicians charged with beating a male patient at the state psychiatric hospital in Goldsboro.
Questions have also surfaced about waste in the North Carolina Mental Health System, including a decsion by Cherry Hospital Director Jack St Clair
and other managers to spend $5000 on a for a nurse, Gladwyn "Shryl" Uzzell, to take a 15 day trip to Africa (source: News Observer, July 31, 2008).
According to the North Carolina News & Observer, Feb 24, 2008,
North Carolina's mental-health reform was supposed to improve treatment for the mentally ill and provide good value for taxpayers. It has done neither.
The state has wasted at least $400 million in an ill-conceived and poorly executed plan to treat more mentally ill people in their own communities and fewer in the state's four psychiatric hospitals, a News & Observer investigation shows.
The title of March 1, 2008 News Observer article was eerily prophetic -- "Caregivers abuse patients, and usually get away with it.
Charges are filed in just 13 percent of cases. The lowest-paid, least-trained workers spend the most time with patients"
The article indicated that the head of the state hospital system, James Osberg, said he was unaware so few were charged with a crime.
"I cannot tell you why these were not [prosecuted] in the past," said Osberg, "But I'm saying at this point that when there is
a case of substantiated abuse ... and it is determined that charges are appropriate, we will direct
that they take the charges on those individuals."
Also, according to the News Observer, 82 patients have died in NC state hospitals under questional circumstances
under circumstances that raise questions, includings a beating by another patient, restraint,suffocation,
injections an antipsychotic drug, hanging when unsupervised, constipation and death resulting infection, untreated urinary tract infections
, and of blood infections. Other patients, according to the Observer, died after discharge from conditions related to their hospitalization.
