A state official acknowledged Monday that hiring workers in mental health hospitals has become hard, as more potentially violent patients are referred from the court system and salaries are stagnant.
Speaking in the wake of a staff member?s death this weekend at the Spring Grove Hospital Center in Catonsville, Health and Mental Hygiene Secretary S. Anthony McCann said “it?s difficult to recruit people” for state hospital positions.
“Some of it is money,” said McCann, who was among the recipients of a letter Sunday from an employees? union detailing hospital staffing concerns. “Some of this is a difficult population to treat and provide care for.”
By all accounts, 39-year-old Lee McDuffy was a direct-care assistant at Spring Grove who took that job seriously. He died Saturday afternoon after struggling with three other staff members to break up a fight that broke out between two patients, Maryland State Police said.
McDuffy, working his second eight-hour shift at the time, was hit in the process of medicating one of the patients, a union official said. McDuffy was taken to St. Agnes Hospital afterward, saying he didn?t feel well, and died at about 1 p.m., police said. Authorities have not linked his death to the struggle to break up the patients? fight, a police spokesman said. An autopsy report was still pending Monday.
McDuffy?s death has stunned his co-workers and “sent shock waves throughout the whole state work force,” said Sue Esty, interim director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 92.
In the letter, which was addressed to Gov. Robert Ehrlich and sent to McCann, Esty said the increase in court-referred patients at state hospitals “demands changes in staff training, staff-to-client ratios, staff job descriptions and pay.”
McCann said he wouldn?t commit to any particular changes yet, but said he planned to talk more with the employees about their concerns. Esty said she hoped to hear back by the end of the week.
