Conditions are so bad at the state-run Madden Mental Health Center, near Maywood, that state officials have threatened in a confidential memo to close the 240-bed hospital unless improvements are made in a month.
The newly appointed inspector general of the state Department of Mental Health, which operates the facility on the grounds of the Hines Veterans Hospital at 1200 S. 1st Ave., warned of a possible closing in the April 2 memo, obtained Monday by the Tribune.
Inspector General Cathleen ”C.J.” Dombrowski said she had toured Madden four times in three weeks and found the hospital ”unsanitary and non-therapeutic.”
”Treatment programs have been virtually non-existent; procedures established to protect patients are not being followed; and abusive and unauthorized-absence incidents are becoming more problematic,” Dombrowski said in the memo, written to agency Director Jess McDonald.
Dombrowski acknowledged that the problems are ”systemic, long-standing issues for this facility.” But she said that Madden had 30 days to resolve them.
”If, after a 30-day review, the facility has not progressed to providing a safe and therapeutic environment, the office of inspector general will begin a unit-by-unit closure of this facility,” she said.
The acknowledgment by a top department official that one of the state`s mental hospitals is in abysmal shape comes less than six months after the agency fired the director of another large hospital, the Chicago-Read Mental Health Center, over similar problems.
Supt. Jon Steinmetz was fired after the Mental Health Association in Illinois, a patients` rights group, found deplorably unsanitary conditions and a lack of mental-health treatment at Chicago-Read, 4200 N. Oak Park Ave.
Shortly after Steinmetz was fired, the former director and inspector general of the Department of Mental Health decided to take early retirement. Gov. Jim Edgar then installed McDonald and Dombrowski as the new management team.
McDonald said Monday that the threat to close Madden was not saber-rattling.
”We`re not anxious to close it, but I`m not going to run a facility that is unsafe,” he said.
McDonald said he had directed his top deputy in charge of mental-health issues, Leigh Steiner, to devise a closure plan in case Madden must be shut down.
But Roberta Lynch, a spokeswoman for the union representing the 369 workers at Madden, said the closure threat was extreme. She also blamed the hospital`s problems on fighting among its managers.
”They have had the worst infighting there, and it`s almost paralyzed the reasonable operation of the facility,” said Lynch, of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
Lynch said she hoped McDonald and Dombrowski would not follow through on their threat to shut down Madden because it is an important link in the state`s mental-health network.
”It`s located in an area where people don`t have ready access to any other facility,” Lynch said.
Dombrowski`s inspections and memo came after the Mental Health Association received a complaint from a woman who said her 25-year-old son, a Madden patient, had been struck by a hospital worker.
