174
A 12-year-old killed herself at a Spokane hospital that recently closed its youth psychiatric unit
(www.investigatewest.org)
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
174 points (97.8% liked)
News
28915 readers
4344 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It’s medical incompetence not understaffing. They could have had a remote sitter, but they didn’t do it. Sacred Heart has a crap ton of resources.
ah, i'll take your word for it. but it seems closing a psych unit would cut staff and resources which would lead to something terrible like this.
They closed the unit, they didn’t short it. They just put them on other floors. Those nurses haven’t been trained or don’t give a shit. It’s policy to have a human in a room with a suicide risk. Children are priority. If they can’t get a tele sitter in there, a physical person will be.
Since that didn’t happen, it’s negligence. Someone didn’t do their job.
No not quite. For the record both my wife and I work at hospitals.
The article itself reads:
A discontinuation of a sitter following protocols during a 3 month stay is quite normal, and also a give-and-take of trust. All of this is going to come down to patient charting and whether the doctors followed protocol in discontinuing sitter monitoring for an SI patient. Clearly as the article reads there were signs of improvement and at some point that child would have to be discharged.
They also noted they wanted to move the child to an patient psych facility but they were full. At its core, a hospital is not a long-term care facility. To house a child for 3 months on this is beyond the scope of what most Hospitals are capable of adequately handling as acute care facilities, and yes, she should have been transferred to a pediatric psych facility... But again, the system is backlogged.
This is a system strained to its core. What should be emphasized here is 1) The psych unit would've had the PHYSICAL measures to prevent her from leaving, independent of anything else. Yes, this was a cut. 2) The entire medical system is under immense stress right now. A true crisis. Staffing shortages are absolutely one key aspect of this among others.
For the record, my spouse worked for THAT hospital. So, quite.
Eh big doubt, but ask them what the protocol is for discontinuation of sitter following psych eval improvement and pending discharge.
gotcha, thanks for explaining it more for me.
They pay some (all?) of their C-level execs (and maybe others) tens of millions of $/yr in salaries and bonuses. What, you want that money spent on staff and patient resources? You must be a Communist! Some claimed numbers from 2019:
Naturally they fight against their workers' unions too
It's not even incompetence. It's criminal negligence.
Agreed.