Suicide risks found at VA sites

OLYMPIA, Wash. — The Department of Veterans Affairs knew for months that shower heads, handrails and other fixtures posed serious suicide risks to Seattle-area psychiatric patients but refused to fix the problems, inspectors said in a report released Friday.

The VA said it scrambled to remedy problems in Seattle after a medical standards group threatened to pull its endorsement of two area hospitals last month. Health care for the nation's veterans has been rocked in recent months by accounts of shoddy treatment at the Department of Defense's Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., was unsatisfied with the agency's response and personally inspected the Seattle VA hospital's progress on Friday.

"We are all clearly very, very concerned about the report that has come out," Murray told the administrators when she arrived at the hospital. "It set alarm bells off for all of us."

The Chicago-based Joint Commission, a nonprofit hospital standards group, said psychiatric ward conditions posed an "immediate threat to life" after it inspected the VA Puget Sound Health Care System in May.

VA officials initially refused to release details of the inspection, which was first reported by The News Tribune of Tacoma. Murray, a senior member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, released it Friday after obtaining a copy.

The document said VA officials knew in February that suicidal patients could use several room fixtures to hang themselves but "rejected that these were viable risks and elected not to correct." An internal report was issued that month after a patient at the Seattle VA hospital committed suicide in November.

The directors of the psychiatric wards at the hospital said they have been trying to weigh the threat posed by objects such as support bars on hospital beds against the fact that the fixtures are needed by patients.

After two hours touring the two psychiatric wards, Murray said the hospital is making progress on the issues identified in the commission's report.

Similar conditions were seen in a Tacoma psychiatric ward, but nothing was done — even though one patient tried to commit suicide in January, the report said.

The Puget Sound VA started correcting the problems immediately in May, when Joint Commission inspectors were visiting the hospitals, VA spokeswoman Jeri Rowe said.

"We started making changes within the first 24 hours they were here," she said of the four-day inspection.