California’s network of state psychiatric hospitals is charged with treating people with mental illness who pose a danger to themselves or others, but workers faced with ongoing assaults by patients have struggled to provide a therapeutic environment. After the murder of a psychiatric technician by a patient at Napa State Hospital in 2010, the state vowed to improve safety at its hospitals. My investigation shows that the state’s measures were inadequate. Since the murder, workers at the state’s five psychiatric hospitals, including Napa State Hospital, have suffered thousands of assaults a year and lost tens of thousands of workdays, forcing taxpayers to pay at least $135 million in workers’ compensation and overtime costs.
Patients at the five hospitals committed nearly 26,000 assaults between 2011 and 2014, the latest year for which data are available, according to aggressive incident report records obtained from the Department of State Hospitals, which oversees the facilities. Staff were the victims of 11,000 — more than 42 percent — of those assaults, the records show. Psychiatric technicians, nurses and their colleagues sustained 2,745 assaults at the five facilities in 2014, nearly 150 more than the year before. In the past two fiscal years, 2013-14 and 2014-15, they lost 105,108 days of work, the equivalent of 473 full-time employees.
As a result, taxpayers have been spending tens of millions of dollars a year in overtime that leaves workers exhausted, prone to making mistakes and even more vulnerable to injury. Last year, 18.4 million taxpayers filed with the California Franchise Tax Board. The money spent on overtime could have hired hundreds of full-time psych techs, greatly reducing the risk of violence while allowing staff to focus on the therapeutic care they were trained to provide. It would have cost the average taxpayer less than the price of a latte at Starbucks.