Editor,

There are questions regarding the incident at Whidbey General Hospital that I refrained from airing until the article appeared in the March 21 Whidbey News-Times.

Let me address the concerns that arise from Saturday’s article.

Monitoring the behavior of restrained patients is a common practice; however, individual recording of the patient without permission is a violation of state and federal statues.

Prior to the alleged assault, the nurse’s aide may have violated these statues by video recording the patient. If it was a recording made by a hospital camera monitoring the patient, then it is part of the patient’s file and cannot be accessed without the patient’s approval or a court order.

Concerning the investigation into the incident, the first question is, if the patient swung and struck any of the nurses, was she not charged with a third-degree assault charge, per state law?

The next question is, was anyone from the North Sound Mental Health Administration, the regional mental health ombudsman, or the Office of Protection and Advocacy, contacted and informed of the incident within the 24-48 hour time period?

Was anyone who was trained in the best standard and with the experience, outside of the hospital or local agencies to prevent a conflict of interests, in the methods of seclusion and restraint, added to the investigation team?

The last question deals with the patient’s treatment for her mental illness. If she was there for 13 days and still required seclusion and restraint, were her medications changed to provide an alternative? If she was in the hospital for that long and required that level of treatment, I would assume that the patient was ITA’d and on a 14-day commitment.

If this was the case and she was refusing medications, all it takes is agreement between two qualified physicians who examined her, then medications could be administered involuntarily for up to the 24 hours before a 90-day commitment hearing, or if the patient was stabilized and agrees to medication.

Though I am currently medically retired, I was a clinical director of an in-patient psychiatric facility.

Further, I was the mental health advocate for the state of Nevada and had primary responsibility to investigate these types of incidents and a Designated Mental Health Professional for most of the last 20-plus years.

I raise these questions to make sure both the nurse and patient in question receive a fair hearing.

G. Robert Brown, MA, LMHC

Oak Harbor