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The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) today was hit with a federal class action lawsuit for locking youth in psychiatric hospitals “long past the time that their treatment required them to be confined… Upon being medically cleared for discharge, instead of going to an appropriate facility, the Defendants forced the children to remain in locked psychiatric wards, causing immense harm.”
While locked up, the children received no formal education, were largely kept indoors, and had little if any opportunity to interact with family members and friends. The prolonged confinement is detrimental to kids’ mental health, making them feel like they have been abandoned while subjecting them to dangerous and frightening conditions.
“The first rule of health care is ‘do no harm,’ yet the State of Illinois and its child welfare agency have made a mockery of that precept,” said Charles Golbert, acting Cook County Public Guardian and leader of the class action suit. “The harm to these youth that DCFS is committing by locking them up long after they’ve completed their courses of treatment is incalculable. It’s an abject moral and human rights failure.”
Today’s suit charges not only that state officials have known of the problem for decades, but have actively worsened it by repeatedly cutting budgets for appropriate treatment facilities and foster homes. Tragically, this practice not only violates vulnerable children’s rights, it also costs Illinois millions of dollars – every month DCFS is wasting over $125,000 to lock children in psychiatric wards where they are not supposed to be.
Since the 1980s, Golbert and every one of his predecessors at the Cook County Public Guardian’s office have complained to DCFS and in federal court about children being locked in psychiatric wards long after they should have been discharged. Although the federal court entered a consent decree 27 years ago requiring DCFS to not hospitalize children longer than medically necessary, DCFS’s unconstitutional practice remains and has actually become much more prevalent.
DCFS would not comment on the lawsuit but said finding placements for children is challenging. Some residential treatment centers and foster homes won’t accept children in psychiatric hospitals with serious mental or behavioral health conditions, said Neil Skene, special assistant to Walker.
The agency is working to build additional services and reduce the need for hospitalization, Skene said, but the problem is part of a larger issue related to rebuilding the state’s mental health system.
“The availability of community resources and facilities to handle complex behavioral and physical health needs of children and teenagers is a serious need in Illinois,” Skene said. “This is a decades-long problem in Illinois that has now fallen to the current leadership of DCFS. We are at the deep end of a challenge within the healthcare system.”
The number of children being held beyond what is considered medically necessary has increased in recent years. In 2017, 301 psychiatric hospital admissions of children in DCFS care went beyond medical necessity, a sharp rise from 88 in 2014, according to DCFS figures.
* Tribune…
Also Thursday, an Uptown psychiatric hospital that is struggling to survive amid complaints that young patients face unsafe conditions will ask a federal judge to intervene in its battle with the federal government over funding.
Chicago Lakeshore Hospital will ask U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman to grant it a temporary restraining order to stop Saturday’s cutoff date for the facility to continue billing Medicare and Medicaid for new patients.
With the vast majority of patients receiving federal benefits, hospital officials argued in Wednesday’s court filing that they would be forced to close and the area’s access to critical mental health services will be diminished.
DCFS stopped admitting children in its care to Chicago Lakeshore several weeks ago amid an increased number of calls to the state’s child abuse hotline this year. The final DCFS teen was transferred out of the hospital Nov. 30.
posted by Rich Miller
Thursday, Dec 13, 18 @ 12:17 pm
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So basically, two year no funding and Short change the service agencies results in a messed up under funded mess. Color me surprised. If we want to actually help these kids the JB needs to serious about DCFS recovery from last administration.
Comment by Union thug Thursday, Dec 13, 18 @ 12:37 pm
Union thug, Rauner and the impasse didn’t help but did you read the parts about how this has been going on for “decades”? About the consent decree signed 27 years ago for the same problem? Tunnel vision doesn’t help solve problems.
Comment by Perrid Thursday, Dec 13, 18 @ 12:41 pm
===Rauner and the impasse didn’t help but did you read the parts about===
…how psychiatric hospital admissions of children in DCFS care beyond medical necessity spiked in 2017?
Fixed it for ya.
As with everything, the impasse turned a crisis into a disaster.
Comment by Rich Miller Thursday, Dec 13, 18 @ 12:51 pm
Fair enough. I’ll still argue we need to look past the impasse in order to see and fix the real drivers of the problem though. Which is likely years/decades of under funding, though just throwing more money at the providers is unlikely to fix it by itself.
Comment by Perrid Thursday, Dec 13, 18 @ 1:00 pm
–As with everything, the impasse turned a crisis into a disaster.–
And it was a willful, planned strategy. That’s how the history books will remember Rauner.
Comment by wordslinger Thursday, Dec 13, 18 @ 1:01 pm
it’s no surprise that DCFS is a screwed-up mess — what would be a surprise is if it wasn’t a screwed-up mess.
employees are typical indifferent public payrollers, the job is impossible and most of the people they work with are hugely difficult to assist. nice prescription for disaster
Comment by jim Thursday, Dec 13, 18 @ 1:16 pm
=== employees are typical indifferent public payrollers ===
99 percent of DCFS staff are passionate about their work. They care more about the kids they serve than anyone.
Comment by Yellow Dog Democrat Thursday, Dec 13, 18 @ 1:44 pm
jim
Do you know DCFS workers or are you just speaking from ignorance?
My experience at DCFS was that most were committed to serving their youth in care. The job is difficult and some employees burn out. That is a hard problem to manage.
Keeping children beyond medical necessity was a particular problem that received a lot of management attention when I was there. There were simply not enough places to put them. Building that capacity will take real dollars.
Comment by Last Bull Moose Thursday, Dec 13, 18 @ 1:44 pm
=== employees are typical indifferent public payrollers ===
In my admittedly anecdotal experience the frontline workers at DCFS are amazing people, going into difficult and sometimes dangerous environments, dealing with truly serious and challenging issues.
Comment by Earnest Thursday, Dec 13, 18 @ 1:50 pm
I speak with caseworkers daily. From my experience they are some of the more dedicated and overworked group. I don’t know many people in both private and public employ that will regularly take stuff home to work. Take the laptop on vacation so the can get the ever increasing work load done.
Yes DCFS has been one of the agencies under funded and that’s part of the problem that was exasperated by the impass. Can’t blame the front line working folks for it.
Comment by Union thug Thursday, Dec 13, 18 @ 2:07 pm
Gee Jim, I guess the caseworker murdered on the job recently was a typical indifferent public payroller. Would love to know what your job is and what kind of dedication you bring to it.
Comment by Anonymous Thursday, Dec 13, 18 @ 2:13 pm
James McIntyre from Foster Care Allumni highlighted this issue in testimony last session, even warned about potential lawsuit, well…it happend. Maybe legislators and DCFS should listen to the kid next time.
And regarding the odd swipe at DCFS employees, all I can say is given the caseloads thease folks have, the working conditions, the chronicly underfunding budget, anyone of us would have quit and took a more stable job. Yet these folks are out there on the front line protecting kids and helping families everyday. They need more funding not an online swipe.
Comment by Kyle Hillman Thursday, Dec 13, 18 @ 2:57 pm
Does transforming a decades-long crisis into a full-on disaster count as a dereliction of duty by the state’s CEO? Can it be added to list of scandals brought about by that budget impasse?
Personally, I think it can.
Comment by dbk Thursday, Dec 13, 18 @ 3:28 pm
I personally know 3 DCFS workers, 2 now retired and 1 still working. One of them goes all the way back to when CFS was just a division of Mental Health.
For as far back as I can remember (about 45 years), the agency has been consistently underfunded and suffered from inconsistent leadership. The good directors were exceptional, the bad directors were awful. The staff, by and large, were dedicated but also fustrated by changing policies and priorities. The actual workers are riding a rollercoaster that is falling apart and they have no control over it.
As both the articles and Rich noted, these are not new problems.
I do know that, in the name of cost savings, a lot of the actual service delivery has been outsourced to assorted social service agencies … the same agencies that were devastated by the 2 year budget impasse, so services now are harder to deliver than before. Note: I am not blaming Rauner for 45 years of problems, but he does own the blame for making it exponentially worse.
I’m not sure what the fix is. I don’t think money, by itself, will fix it. I think we need to rethink how we deliver the services. Maybe the solution would be some consistency in the Director’s office. Maybe the GA should make it a non-political job with a fixed term, say 6 or 10 years … and subject to removal only by the GA. Then appoint a professional to it. Another change would be to staff up the agency so there is more oversight on the outsourced service delivery; tie satisfactory service delivery to more timely payment.
Anyway, the point if this long ramble is they are good people at DCFS … but it’s hard to work in a broken agency.
Comment by RNUG Thursday, Dec 13, 18 @ 4:12 pm
The one thing I’d want less than a job with DCFS is a child with DCFS.
Let’s hope some positive change can come from this.
– MrJM
Comment by @misterjayem Thursday, Dec 13, 18 @ 4:23 pm
jim, as a former foster parent your comments upset me. I haven’t experienced anything that you said.
A suggestion. Allow parents to take in kids out of region. Illinois is separated in several regions and foster parents can only take in children in that region. Rich foster parents from Chicago can’t have poor children from southern Illinois, so they have to wait while kids in southern Illinois have to wait.
Comment by Da Big Bad Wolf Thursday, Dec 13, 18 @ 4:49 pm
DBBWolf, I know you mean well, but pulling those kids out of Southern Illinois and up to Chicago means the kids are taken out of their schools, away from friends and other family members who can provide some stability and emotional support for these kids in a very frightening time.
Taking them that far away also interferes with their court cases.
I’m not arguing for kids being left in situations where they are being abused in any way. I’m saying we need to do more to help these kids and their parents before foster care becomes necessary.
Comment by Lynn S. Thursday, Dec 13, 18 @ 6:31 pm
Wolf:
Lynn is correct, it’s in kid’s best interests and a legal necessity they be placed in care in their own school district whenever possible; and because reunification requires strengthening the parent-child bond, children cannot be placed on the other side of the state.
The solution to so many problems is to increase foster parent recruitment and retention by raising the reimbursement rate to reflect the actual cost of caring for a child.
Comment by Thomas Paine Friday, Dec 14, 18 @ 8:58 am