THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, May 9, 1996 TAG: 9605090370
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LAURA LAFAY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 110 lines
When inmate Jerome Walton Jr., 28, died after a Correctional Medical Services nurse forgot to schedule him for dialysis, Norfolk City Jail spokesman George Schaeffer got a message to call the director of communications for CMS in St. Louis.
``She wanted to know what we had said so far to the media,'' Schaeffer remembers. ``She wanted to see a copy of the press release we were going to put out. Like, `Here's what you do, here's your priority list. Have you talked to the press? What have you said?' She was . . . trying to manage the whole event.
``I just got the sense . . . `These people do this all the time.' ''
Walton's family filed a wrongful death suit against CMS. On Wednesday, a federal judge approved a settlement in which the company agreed to pay the family $150,000 for his death in February 1994.
Since 1994, there have been allegations of medical neglect in inmate deaths and injuries in Arkansas, Alabama, New Mexico, Georgia and Virginia.
CMS, also known as ARA Health Services Inc., is a division of the Philadelphia-based Aramark Corp. The corporation owns more than 300 companies operating nursing homes, cleaning services, trucking lines, vending machines, food service, sports arena concessions and health care services.
CMS operates medical facilities in 184 prisons and jails in 27 states, including all prisons in Massachusetts, Delaware, Alabama, Missouri and New Mexico. This month, New Jersey officials agreed to pay the company roughly $60 million per year for three years to provide care for the state's 26,000 inmates.
CMS continues to get and keep contracts, despite criticism from experts and lawsuits filed by a number of inmates and their families. Some examples:
From 1983 to 1993, 17 sick inmates died in custody at the Norfolk City Jail, more than at any other jail in Virginia. Most of the deaths occurred after 1989, the year CMS took over the jail's medical services. In 1993, there were six inmate deaths.
A 1993 investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice found that CMS' method of screening incoming inmates for health problems at the jail was ``woefully inadequate'' and that the company failed to evaluate and monitor inmates with tuberculosis, asthma, seizure disorders, high blood pressure, diabetes and AIDS.
The investigation also found that the company's staff was ``not appropriately trained,'' that medications were haphazardly administered and often expired, that records ``fail to meet any known professional standard,'' and that its doctor diagnosed inmates without examining them.
The last Norfolk inmate to die under CMS' care was Walton, who was being held for probation violation and possession of marijuana. He had asked repeatedly for two days to be taken for dialysis treatment. After collapsing in his cell, he was taken for treatment in Norfolk on Feb. 14, 1994. Walton had a seizure and suffered a heart attack in the medical facility's parking lot. He lapsed into a coma and died 10 days later.
Four months later, Sheriff Robert McCabe severed the jail's $1.6 million contract with CMS.
Seventeen months after Walton's death, another 28-year-old inmate died in a jail in Little Rock, Ark. Marvin Glenn Johnson, an insulin-dependent diabetic, told deputies he needed two shots of insulin a day to stay alive, but was given none. After 30 hours without insulin, he was given two shots. His heart stopped.
After Johnson's death, the county sheriff's department ordered an evaluation of the CMS contract at the jail. The evaluation, performed by Dr. B. Jaye Anno of Consultants in Correctional Health Care, echoes the the Norfolk City Jail report: few new inmates were screened, there was ``no systemic approach to the management of chronic or infectious diseases,'' records were badly kept and the doctor routinely diagnosed inmates without touching them.
In Georgia, where CMS had a contract to provide inmate medical care from 1980 until 1995, a medical expert appointed by a federal judge said he was ``ashamed'' of the conditions he saw during his investigation of six prisons. Dr. Ronald Shansky, a prison medical specialist from Chicago, complained in several reports that CMS doctors failed to provide ``adequate and compassionate care to ailing and dying inmates.''
Among cases cited by a newspaper report: a 37-year-old inmate who was given Ibuprofen for chest pain and ordered to return to his work assignment. A month later, he died of lung cancer; a man who waited 10 months to see a doctor after suffering a fractured arm in a fall during a seizure. The arm is now permanently damaged and useless; two women who suffered dangerous infections after hysterectomies. One of them, who had no immune system, went into a coma.
In Alabama, CMS subcontracted with Southeast Dialysis - the same company it used in Virginia until March - to perform dialysis for inmates at the St. Clair Correctional Institution in St. Clair County. But in December, after dialysis technicians failed for several weeks to notice that the company had shipped them the wrong kind of dialysis fluid, one patient died and most of the rest were hospitalized.
Technicians at St. Clair ``had sort of noticed people were getting ill, but it wasn't clear what exactly was going on,'' said Dr. J.P. Lufgren, Alabama's chief epidemiologist.
``A patient would get the correct solution one day and perk up, and then the wrong solution the next time and feel worse. So that created a certain amount of confusion. . . The picture wasn't clear until someone said, `Hey! Someone died and everyone else isn't feeling very good so we better send them to the hospital.' ''
After the incident, Lufgren said, Alabama closed the dialysis unit at St. Clair. Dialysis-dependent inmates are now sent outside the prison for treatment. CMS remains under contract to provide inmate care. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
The family of Jerome Walton Jr. filed a wrongful death suit. A
federal judge approved a settlement in which CMS agreed to pay the
family $150,000.
KEYWORDS: PRISONS VIRGINIA HEALTH CARE FATALITIES by CNB