By Dave Ranney
KHI News Service
TOEPKA, Jan. 30
Conditions at Larned State Hospital are not as bad as they appeared in a recent inspection, state welfare officials said Tuesday.
And the complaints that prompted the inspection, they said, were filed by sex offenders housed at the hospital.
“They are extremely proficient in getting people outside the facility to take up their cause,” said Larned State Hospital Superintendent Mark Schutter.
The sex offenders, he said, are housed in the oldest and “most difficult to keep clean”
building on the hospital”s campus.
The hospital was repeatedly cited for poor housekeeping, broken furniture, and faulty plumbing during a November 2006 inspection.
The Kansas Department of Health and Environment noted that in April a female resident who had been put on a “soft diet” choked to death after eating pancakes.
The findings were the subject of a Jan. 21 story in The Wichita Eagle.
Schutter and his boss, Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services Acting Secretary Don Jordan appeared before a joint meeting of the House Health and Human Services Committee and the Senate Health Care Strategies Committee.
Neither Jordan nor Schutter disputed the housekeeping findings. All but one of the conditions, they said, had been corrected.
But Jordan asked legislators to realize that Larned State Hospital has 1,270 sinks and that at any given time, 1 percent of those sinks may be in various states of disrepair.
“That”s 12 sinks,” Jordan said.
And it”s true, he said, not all sinks in patient rooms have hot water. But each floor, he said, has a central bathroom that has hot water.
“Things have to be kept in perspective; at Osawatomie State Hospital, patient rooms don”t have plumbing at all,” said Jordan, who was superintendent at Osawatomie for three years.
Jordan told committee members that Larned State Hospital has $15 million in unfunded maintenance requests. Some of the facilities, he said, haven”t been remodeled since the 1960s.
Jordan said that while the resident”s choking death was regrettable, it”s also true that the hospital is dealing with patients who are increasingly frail and difficult to care for.
“I can assure you that nobody feels worse about what happened than the staff,” he said, noting that workers were present when the resident started choking. Their efforts to clear the patient”s airway were unsuccessful, he said.
Several legislators balked at the explanations.
“The whole time I”ve had a dog, he”s always had a clean dog house,” said Sen. Susan Wagle, R-Wichita and chairwoman of the Senate Health Care Strategies Committee.
Wagle said she couldn”t imagine the trauma of a parent having a mentally ill child in a place where inspectors had found “dead bugs, urine on the walls and cold showers.”
Schutter said none of those conditions applied to the children”s unit. Roughly three-fourths of the deficiencies cited by inspectors, he said, were in the sex-offenders unit.
Rep. Jeff Colyer, R-Overland Park, asked whether SRS or KDHE had informed legislators of the findings. Jordan said they had not.
After the hearing, Rep. Brenda Landwehr, R-Wichita and chairwoman of the House Health and Human Services Committee said she would forward the findings to the committee that oversees the SRS budget.
“It”s pretty clear the hospital has some issues to address,” Landwehr said. “But there also may be an issue as to the lack of consistency in the way inspections are conducted
we”ve run into that before with nursing homes.”
The House Social Services Budget Committee is schedule to review Larned State Hospital”s budget between 3:30 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. Thursday in Room 514-S at the Statehouse.
-Dave Ranney is a staff writer for KHI News Service, which specializes in coverage of health issues facing Kansans. He can be reached at
dranney@khi.org
or at 785-233-5443, ext. 128.