Report paints bleak picture of conditions at New Jersey's psychiatric hospitals

When the only hospital for mentally-ill patients in New Jersey's criminal justice system faced a possible shutdown earlier this year because patients spent too much time locked in their rooms, concerns about the underfunded, under-staffed state psychiatric hospitals quickly became a priority for Gov. Phil Murphy.

“We really can’t survive without that hospital,” Shereef Elnahal, the state Health Commissioner said of the Ann Klein Forensic Center in West Trenton. Elnahal learned about the threatened loss of accreditation for the hospital on his first day on the job.

Problems at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Parsippany, another of the four hospitals in the state system, were already severe: Staff members feared that patients would assault them and spoke of feces on the walls. State Sen. Richard Codey, an Essex County Democrat, said he was “sickened” by conditions there and reports that violent patients were “running things.”

On Friday, Elnahal announced an 18-month plan to fix the troubled institutions by hiring more staff members and investing in capital improvements and technology.

Read more: https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/2018/08/24/report-paints-bleak-picture-nj-psychiatric-hospitals/1085058002/