After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that two Georgia mental health patients are entitled to care in the community, there has been a push by the U.S. Department of Justice to move patients out of state hospitals, The Augusta Chronicle's Tom Corwin reports. Transfers from institutional to community settings can't be carried out over the opposition of patients, if their placements can't be reasonably accommodated or if patients wouldn't be able to benefit from being out in the community.
There have been unintended consequences of the court ruling in Georgia. The state has not been meeting patient-care standards and there have been a number of unexpected deaths in community-care homes, Corwin reports. U.S. District Judge J. Leon Holmes ruled 3.5 years ago that the Justice Department was seeking to enforce patients being moved to community settings even though parents and guardians of patients hadn't asked for it.
Corwin found that the death rates for patients in long-term care in the community is higher and that many parents fear that "patients will not receive a comparable level of care in the community, and particularly for the many medically fragile patients, this could prove fatal."
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