BANGOR, Maine — It has been just more than a year since David Proffitt, the much-maligned former president and CEO of The Acadia Hospital in Bangor, tendered his forced resignation.
Ever since, new upper management at the 100-bed psychiatric hospital has been striving to ensure the quality of inpatient and outpatient programs that have been affected by a three-year wave of staff turnover at the facility.
With the Proffitt era now a year behind it, Acadia Hospital continues to address workplace safety issues, confront physician recruiting challenges and implement new strategies for managing psychotic and potentially dangerous patients with minimal use of physical restraints and patient isolation. An investigation by the Bangor Daily News reveals the effort to stabilize and maintain the quality of care provided by the facility’s inpatient and outpatient programs remains a work in progress.
Within weeks of Proffitt’s resignation, his position was filled by Daniel B. Coffey, chief financial officer of the Brewer-based Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems, which operates Acadia Hospital and six other regional hospitals. Not long after assuming his new position, Coffey found himself at the epicenter of upper-management turnover and the resignations of six staff psychiatrists.
According to Coffey, Acadia’s operational priorities include decreasing reliance on high-cost, temporary psychiatrists, known as “locum tenens,” who were used to fill the jobs of staff physicians who resigned.
According to one longtime staff psychiatrist who since has resigned, Acadia experienced a 70 percent turnover within its medical staff, and those who resigned collectively took with them hundreds of years of front-line clinical experience.
Coffey also faced in-house challenges related to workplace safety. Among Proffitt’s institutional priorities was reducing the physical restraint of patients and the use of seclusion.
“We can create coercion-free care environments and injury-free worksites in the same facility,” Proffitt told his staff in a five-minute in-house video. “And that facility will be Acadia very soon.”
While the video recently was removed from the hospital’s website, it can still be viewed online at bangordailynews.com.
Proffitt’s hands-off approach to patient care prompted staff concerns about being exposed to injuries inflicted by patients who were out of control. A federal investigation later showed those concerns were not misplaced.
Just three months before Proffitt stepped down, the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration fined the hospital $11,700 after an investigation into employee complaints determined that there were “serious” violations of safe workplace standards. The OSHA investigation corroborated worker claims of an increase in the number and severity of patient assaults on staff.
The OSHA report notes that from 2008 through 2011, violent patients assaulted staff at least 115 times, resulting in injuries that required 1,741 restricted duty days and approximately 570 days lost to injury.
Among those injured on the job was Robert Patterson, a psychiatric technician from Bucksport. While on the job in the summer of 2010, Patterson was severely beaten by an out-of-control Acadia patient, suffering facial and other injuries that put him out of work for 10 weeks. Patterson said this of The Acadia Hospital in an interview with the BDN in January 2011: “I think conditions will improve.”
Have they?
While Patterson declined to be interviewed, an Acadia Hospital spokesperson said the standing orders on restraint and seclusion have not changed since Proffitt’s departure. Coffey reports that the number of employees missing work because of job-related injuries has declined significantly during the past year.
“During the past six months, 98 percent of Acadia employees have completed intensive, two-day training to learn techniques for management of aggressive behavior,” Coffey said. “In one of our inpatient units, the number of serious employee injury cases during the most recent four months dropped from 12 last year to one this year.”
Trouble followed Proffitt
Proffitt came to Bangor in October 2008 after four years as CEO of the state-funded, 92-bed Riverview Psychiatric Center in Augusta. He held Acadia’s top job for 29 months, leaving the hospital in turmoil given the fallout from what has been described as his “caustic” management style and well-documented concerns about the physical safety of the staff and patients at the private, nonprofit facility.
After leaving Bangor, Proffitt accepted a similar position in August 2011 at the Minnesota Security Hospital in St. Peter. Located about 70 miles southwest of the Twin Cities, the hospital is Minnesota’s largest mental health facility, treating nearly 400 patients considered mentally ill and potentially dangerous.
Proffitt now finds himself unemployed again, having lasted only eight months at his Minnesota job. When he was fired on March 22, 2012, Anne Barry, assistant commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Human Services, said Proffitt proved “unable to build the level of trust with staff needed to foster the environment necessary for the very significant changes that need to occur.”
Similar problems swirled around Proffitt during his tenure in Bangor. There were workers at all levels of The Acadia Hospital staff who described his management style as “toxic” and “confrontive.” Many staff were — and some still are — unwilling to be critical of Proffitt publicly, or even in-house, out of fear of losing their jobs. Those fears, it appears, were well-founded.
On April 13, 2009, Dr. Paul Tisher, the hospital’s long-term chief medical officer, submitted a letter critical of Proffitt’s management style to Acadia Hospital’s board of trustees and to Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems CEO Michelle Hood. Within 10 days, Proffitt fired Tisher, who had been a staff psychiatrist for 15 years.
Tisher’s firing further alienated the facility’s medical staff, prompting a meeting with Hood on April 24, 2009. Among those expressing concerns was Dr. Don C. Payne, who had been on staff for nearly 12 years. In a letter sent to Hood within days of Proffitt firing Tisher, Payne suggested that Tisher be quickly reinstated.
“All that Acadia has worked to be over 17 years is disappearing,” Payne said in his letter to Hood, which he also shared with his medical staff colleagues. “If [Tisher] is not supported and returned to his position quickly, it will take years for Acadia Hospital to recover. Dr. Tisher has been crucial in bringing Acadia Hospital to its current standing. Why would you kill the goose that laid the golden egg?”
Tisher’s threat to legally challenge his firing was resolved within weeks. It also was resolved quietly. Tisher’s wrongful termination dispute with Acadia was settled out of court, with both parties agreeing not to discuss settlement specifics.
A former staff psychiatrist who left Acadia amid the turmoil describes a gradual decline in quality of care driven by the exodus of key top managers and clinically experienced health care professionals. Now working at another Maine hospital, the physician, who asked not to be identified out of fear of professional retaliation, describes Tisher’s firing as the watershed event that triggered a changing of the clinical guard.
“We all had a great deal of professional respect for Dr. Tisher, and, as our chief medical officer, he was a great source of encouragement and advice on how to handle difficult cases,” the physician told the BDN. “I think morale hit bottom when he was replaced as CMO by Allen Schaffer, a psychiatrist who was just out of residency training in Vermont. Two other highly experienced staff psychiatrists, who were both well-respected, were passed over for the job by David Proffitt. The medical staff felt disenfranchised.”
In-house distress and outright contempt for Proffitt, the physician said, resulted in the medical staff referring to him facetiously behind his back as the facility’s “CEO in training.” And after Schaffer’s hiring, “we weren’t too happy with working for a chief medical officer in training.”
Schaffer declined to be interviewed.
“When the medical staff finally met with Michelle Hood about Dr. Tisher’s firing, we predicted then that the quality of care would decline,” the physician said. “Three years later, we were right, considering the devastation left behind.”
Among the points made in letters of concern read to Hood at a medical staff meeting with her after Tisher’s firing was this one: “The medical staff has come to the conclusion that Dr. Proffitt’s approach to clinical matters at Acadia hospital is not compatible with a well-functioning medical staff. The patients we serve need you to take swift and decisive action to prevent further deterioration of the clinical integrity of Acadia Hospital.”
DHHS investigates, cites Acadia
Proffitt’s tenure at the helm of Acadia Hospital also involved allegations that a psychiatric technician who worked in an inpatient children’s unit was a pedophile. A recent investigation by Minnesota Public Radio reporter Madeleine Baran into Proffitt’s professional background revealed that a 27-year-old Acadia patient recognized the technician as the same man who had fondled him and had sex with him over eight years when the patient was between the ages of 7 and 15.
Tisher insisted that Acadia had a legal obligation to report the allegations of abuse to the Maine Department of Health and Human Services. The allegations never were reported by Acadia but subsequently were investigated by DHHS after they were reported by an unnamed clinician. In September 2009, DHHS found that Acadia Hospital had violated Maine law by failing to immediately report a case of suspected child abuse.
The DHHS investigation, which at one point involved Old Town Police Detective Tom Adams, determined that Acadia Hospital “failed to provide a safe environment for vulnerable children in its pediatric outpatient services program,” according to the department’s report. DHHS also found that, after what was termed an “incomplete investigation” of a sexual abuse report, the alleged perpetrator was allowed to return to work with children ranging in age from 5 to 17.
“Some in the administration had a strong positive opinion about [the alleged abuser] and also dismissed the allegations,” the DHHS report states. “They did remove him from his job responsibilities for a period of three weeks but then the decision was made … to allow him to go back to work on the pediatric outpatient program.”
The report says the alleged perpetrator refused to be interviewed by DHHS or by police about the allegations. At the advice of his attorney, he declined to take a polygraph examination. No charges were ever filed.
Detective Adams told the BDN that the investigation was dropped by the Maine attorney general’s office because of a lack of evidence.
“It was an old case,” Adams said. “It was hard to pursue without any real evidence. What we had was totally circumstantial. The alleged victim’s information was totally credible, and I believed it to the point where I attempted to interview the alleged abuser.”
Coffey recently confirmed that the employee who was investigated was “promptly terminated.”
Problems persist
Between April 1, 2011, when Proffitt stepped down, and March 31, 2012, the Licensing and Regulatory Services Division of the Maine Department of Health and Human Services has investigated 10 complaints related to Acadia Hospital and two incidents reported by the hospital itself.
“Of the 10 complaints, five were substantiated for issues with patient rights, physician services, pharmaceutical services and cleanliness of the facility,” according to Alelia Hilt-Lash, the division’s health services supervisor. “DLRS issued Statements of Deficiency and received Plans for Correction from The Acadia Hospital.”
Among the substantiated complaints was an allegation made in July 2011 of a violation of a patient’s right to be free of abuse. Specifically, the allegation claims that Acadia staff failed to declare a psychiatric emergency before restraining a female patient and giving her an intramuscular injection of medication in her buttocks without her consent.
Another complaint investigated by DHHS alleged that patients were forced to take medications against their will and that dosages were increased without patient consent. Also substantiated by DHHS was a complaint investigated in February 2012 that Acadia failed to develop an adequate discharge plan for a patient and that lack of referral “may have contributed to readmission for re-occurrence of psychiatric symptoms based on noncompliance with medications.”
Five complaints were found to be unsubstantiated after being investigated, including one in which a child’s room was described as “filthy and disgusting.” A facility survey conducted in November 2011 by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found Acadia to be in compliance with its standards.
The 10 complaints and two incidents investigated by DHHS during its 2011-12 reporting period compare with 23 complaints reported between April 1, 2010, and March 31, 2011, the last year of Proffitt’s tenure at Acadia. Five other incidents were reported by the hospital itself that year. Five complaints were substantiated by DHHS. The year before, between April 1, 2009, and March 31, 2010, none of six complaints was substantiated, although there were 16 incidents reported by Acadia Hospital.
Financial stress on Acadia
Acadia Hospital’s recent annual filings with the Internal Revenue Service show that among the drains on Acadia’s finances are the expenses of recruiting, housing and paying temporary physicians to fill in after the wave of medical staff vacancies that occurred during Proffitt’s tenure as CEO.
IRS filings show the hospital spent $212,335 on temporary physicians in fiscal year 2008. That figure jumped to $622,431 the next year, and, by the budget year that ended in 2010, Acadia Hospital was spending $2,244,304 on temporary physicians, more than 10 times what it was spending two years earlier — Acadia Hospital’s most recent Form 990 filing with the IRS is accessible at http://www.emhs.org/990.aspx.
“The number of [permanently] employed psychiatrists at Acadia Hospital has more than doubled, from 10 to 21 since 2009,” Coffey said. “Acadia has reduced temporary psychiatrists from a high of nine to two today, with expectations to have no long-term temporary physicians within four months.”
Despite the turmoil of the past four years, the nonprofit Acadia Hospital has been able to finish each budget year in the black. When Proffitt came on as the facility’s president and CEO in October of 2008, Acadia was coming off a budget year that saw revenues exceed expenses by $1,473,615, according to records on file with the IRS. A year later, revenues exceeded expenses by $2,123,966, an increase attributed to $250,000 in additional grant funding, a $250,000 boost in investment income, and revenues from higher inpatient and outpatient volumes. By October of 2010, the year-end budget surplus had dropped to $1,646,275.
The Acadia Hospital’s IRS filing for the budget year that ended in September 2011 — the same year Proffitt left Acadia in April — has not yet been made public, and won’t be until August. When the numbers are released, Coffey said the balance sheet will show a $2.1 million year-end surplus, generated through what Coffey termed “several recovery initiatives.”
Those cost-cutting initiatives allowed Acadia Hospital to bounce back from losses during the first six months of its 2011 budget year. Coffey said Acadia Hospital also ran a deficit during the first six months of the current 2012 budget year, but not to the degree it did a year ago.
One recent effort to expand patient care offerings didn’t go so well, winding up a money loser. A decision to hire a geriatric psychiatrist who specializes in treating dementia and other mental health problems associated with aging prompted renovation of an existing ward at a cost of $50,000, according to Coffey. The new geriatric inpatient service lasted six months and was closed after failing to attract the revenue required to sustain it.
“A geriatric psychiatric inpatient unit was piloted for a few months over a year and a half ago and was discontinued because of very poor reimbursement,” Coffey said when asked about the unit. “Acadia instead began offering outpatient geriatric psychiatry services provided by a board-certified specialist. … That unit was converted to expand child and adolescent inpatient beds in response to a significant unmet need in our region and the state.”
‘Moving in the right direction’
Among those who contend that Acadia Hospital has weathered the turmoil of staff turnover and an era of battered morale are three members of the facility’s board of trustees: John Bragg, Richard Lyons and Dr. Tom McHugh.
A former Bangor mayor, Bragg has spent 12 years as an Acadia Hospital trustee and was board chairman during the turmoil that surrounded Proffitt’s tenure as CEO.
“Things are definitely moving in the right direction,” Bragg said in a recent telephone interview. “Certainly the environment of hostility and tension has been removed. I think Dan Coffey was a great choice to succeed David. He’s a very soft-spoken person with a calmer disposition that has helped in building back a level of camaraderie and teamwork that’s essential to any organization. I’m very pleased to see what’s transpired.”
Bragg was succeeded during the last year as Acadia Hospital’s board chairman by Richard Lyons, who is the superintendent of schools at MSAD 22 in Hampden. He told the BDN in a telephone interview that the board and executive staffs at both Acadia Hospital and Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems have been working with two different consultants — which Coffey said will cost $200,000 — to develop a new governance model that includes measurable benchmarks and objectives. Among those objectives, Lyons said, is less reliance on temporary medical staff.
“We’ve done a lot of strategic planning,” Lyons said. “With the help of Dan Coffey’s leadership, there has been a lot of focus on how we move forward from the tumultuous times of three or four years ago. The situation has stabilized, and Dan’s doing a great job as we recoil from the situation in the past.”
McHugh was a longtime critic of Proffitt’s “overbearing” management style. He gave Coffey high marks for his efforts to improve the situation during a recent job performance evaluation.
“They gave Mr. Proffitt every opportunity and considerable coaching to improve his performance, but he did not benefit from those opportunities,” McHugh said. “Since he left, the intramural dissension has gone away, and we’re doing very well. The atmosphere is much better. There’s still a lot to be done, but people are back in sync. It’s a much happier place.”
Despite the administrative instability that has enveloped the hospital for years now, Hood told the BDN in a telephone interview that she is pleased with the “strategic direction” in which Acadia Hospital is now headed.
“There is definitely a sense of teamwork and camaraderie among the senior staff that is very encouraging and very healthy. … I sense a level of participation that was absent in the past, and from that perspective I would say that it’s all good.”
Hood declined to discuss why Proffitt and Tisher were fired.
“I’m limited by what I can discuss,” Hood said. “And I’ve not speculated on the situation in Minnesota. There are a lot of different sides to the story.”
Hood said in a telephone interview that she did not write a “letter of recommendation” when Proffitt applied for the position he just left in Minnesota. That statement doesn’t square with an email sent on Aug. 8, 2011, by Philip Johnson, Eastern Maine Healthcare System’s vice president for human resources. Johnson’s email to Jennifer Service, who was then the Minnesota Security Hospital’s medical director, makes direct reference to an attached “letter of reference from Michelle Hood regarding David Proffitt.”
Through a spokesperson, Hood said that what was provided to the Minnesota Department of Health and Human Services were documents that confirmed Proffitt’s tenure at Acadia Hospital between Oct. 27, 2008, and April 1, 2011, and a summary of Proffitt’s “accomplishments” as president and CEO.
Among the issues that swirled around Proffitt in Minnesota was the validity of his academic credentials. While in Maine, Proffitt often identified himself in correspondence as “Dr. David S. Proffitt, PhD,” and his resume shows he earned a doctorate in health management from Warren National University. That online, unaccredited school no longer exists, having been shut down by the state of Wyoming in 2009.
That recent disclosure hasn’t changed how Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems verifies the credentials of job applicants, a spokesperson said. “We’ve made no fundamental changes to our process,” said Suzanne Spruce, an Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems community relations specialist. “But we also know that the process isn’t foolproof. There’s always a risk that something in the applicant’s past won’t show up.”
Multiple attempts by the BDN to contact Proffitt in Minnesota have been unsuccessful.
For now, the man at the helm of Acadia Hospital seems eager to put the troubled waters of the recent past behind him and to focus instead on the facility’s future.
“I am sorry for the way many current and former employees were treated in the recent past,” Coffey said in a recent email response to a series of questions posed by the BDN. “I am working to move Acadia Hospital forward to deal with challenges and change required for our future success.”
As is invariably the case, Michelle Hood, seeking (beleatedly) to get ride of Profitt–whose hiring by John Bragg and Co. was itself the embodiment of incompetence–surely wrote a glowing rec to would-be new employers. So Profitt was hired elsewhere, with obviously negative consequences. Bear in mind that Michelle Hood is Chair of the Board of the Univ. of Maine System and exercises a similar contempt for faculty, professional, and classified staff alike, not least in refusing to provide for any pay increases for three years now–and with failed negotiations ongoing–while she enjoys at least $650,000 a year in mere basepay. Bear in mind, too, that Gov. Baldacci, NOT Gov. LePage, appointed Hood to the System Board. Just as so many Acadia patients and their families have suffered, so, too, have thousands of UME System employees, students, and families. But Hood and her corporate fellow executives could care less.
Well, sounds like her nibs could use some “Page” attention on the pay thing alone.
650k yr!!!! my word, that’s like 12,500 a week!! unreal, un-effin real.. that’s just wrong.. no wonder we can’t afford insurance and healthcare bills.. that’s just one person! man, i’m in the wrong business..
Let us be very clear: $800,000 per year!!!
So now that Hood has destroyed mental health services in Eastern Maine, she is on to destroy higher education. Perfect! Next she will be the governor…Keep at it, Mainers!
My child was in Acadia durning the summer of 2010. I made complaints to everyone…even the Licensing and Regulatory Division. Nothing was done at all. It appeared that it was being covered up by the hospital and DHHS at the time. We still continue to suffer from the harm that was caused. Thank God, for the sake of the children in there now, there was such a huge staff turnover. The staff employed at the time my child was there helped lie and cover up the things being done.
Acadia has always covered up its patient abuse….as a recipient of said abuse I can tell you it has been going on for years…at least since 2002 when I was the brunt of physical and chemical abuse at the hands of Acadia staff and doctors….what ensued after I complained to the only entity that would listen (the Disability Rights Center in Augusta) was nothing….years later when I finally obtained my chart I found that they had manipulated it to make me look like a drug addict (I wasn’t) to cover up the physical abuse and subsequent chemical abuse they subjected me to to try to make me forget what was done to me by one certain psychotic nurse. I was given Xanax (up to 8 milligrams a day) Clonipin, and Haldol…all in large doses….I had been on none of those drugs prior to admission, as a matter of fact, Haldol was the drug that made me have a violent reaction in the first place. I had been awoken the night of admission and given it by some nurse even though I was asleep and not acting out in any manner. Guess she didn’t want to take any chances on having a bad night with a patient she wasn’t familiar with so she gave a PRN med. I have little memory of that stay at Acadia other than the flashbacks of the physical abuse and little flashes of being trotted out by staff , drugged out of my mind to perform for charting purposes; ie: being told to kiss the perpetrator of the physical abuse so they could chart we had made up…. I will always wonder what else was done to me; for instance, did they give me electroshock treatments against my will (I never would have consented to those)? I can not explain my total lack of memory any other way despite all the drugs they were giving me. Of course it helped that the my treating doctor’s husband had been employed by the State of Maine’s department of mental health at one time. He knew who to go to to protect his wife. This was all under Dottie Hill, CEO, whom I remember (again in a super drugged state) asking me “What I wanted” around what that psychotic nurse had done. It was a nightmare of a hospitalization…one from which I cannot awaken…you can’t imagine what it feels like to know you became a piece of meat to people you are supposed to be able to trust….mental illness robs you of your dignity…..Acadia robbed me of my humanity.
the Maine OLR, particularly, Dir Anne Head, lacks incite, education and empathy to investigate and disciplne and make right. I have been battleling her and her organization for 11 years now. Gov LePAge is her boss. He needs to wake up and see Anne Head is NOT doing her job, nor does she care to do her job right. More clients are being hurt by her ineptness. They are protecting the therapists when their job is to look out for the victim. I hope hell awaits her for the damage she has done.
Profitt is a disgrace. He needs to go to jail for the misdeeds and frauds he has committed. Being an Acadia employee, I can tell you that Mr. Coffey came into a difficult situation and seems to be more than capable to do the job. If we can only get back Dr. Tisher, Dr. Rockcress, and all the other wonderful and dedicated Doctors we had. Proffitt’s damage is going to be long term and Hood’s stupidity will last for as long as she keeps her job.
Those doctors will likely not return. They probably have new jobs. It’s hard to go back to a place where you were kicked in the teeth, because you know that even with the people at the top “leadership” positions gone, those who are above them (like the state commissioners in Minnesota) are still there and they let it happen in the first place.
Mr. Coffey,
if you knew anything about mental health, you wouldn’t have made a naive comment about “staff taking 2 days training to learn techniques for management of aggressive pts…” If it was as simple as taking a course, we would have never had a problem.
It is about LEADERSHIP, Mr. Coffey. Leadership from a competent medical director; leadership from a competent chief nursing officer; leadership from the physician, head of the inpatient team; leadership from nurses who are fully supported by administration.
To sum it up:
Coffey has zero experience in mental health; the chief nursing officer came from EMMC with zero experience in mental health.
I will not comment about the current medical director…Time will tell, and it will be something.
I will also not comment about the inpatient physicians. Suffice it to say that all the competent ones have left a long time ago.
As for the numbers, it might not be that significant…but it is worth to just to point out how easy it is for Acadia administrators to lie. There’s no way that renovations for a geriatric unit has cost only $ 50,000…It was $150,000 to $300,000. The garage we built 7 years ago had cost $30,000.
Come on, Mr. Coffey. There is a smart way to lie, and a non smart way to lie. You chose the wrong way to lie. Exactly like your boss…
At any rate, opening the inpatient geriatric unit was not a pilot endeavor…It was meant to stay open. It was just an example of how impulsive and not thoughtful was Proffitt in his erratic management style.It is an example of a “tiny” mistake Proffitt made that happened to cost the hospital a “tiny” $150,000.
Be transparent, Mr. Coffey. It is a prerequisite for working in mental health.
“A former Bangor mayor, Bragg has spent 12 years as an Acadia Hospital trustee and was board chairman during the turmoil that surrounded Proffitt’s tenure as CEO.”
Reminder to the editors: Bangor has not had a mayor since the early 1930s. Bragg was the City Council chair.
This is unfortunately, not a great piece of investigative reporting.
It should be noted, for the record, that the letter sent by Dr Tisher to the board of trustees and Michelle Hood, was specifically about the pedophile employee, and the need to promptly report him to the proper authorities, and was prompted by Proffitt’s refusal to report. Tisher refused to be part of a cover up, but Hood, by standing with Proffitt in the dismissal of Tisher, is an integral part of the cover up. THIS IS THE CRUX OF THE STORY.
This piece was supposed to be published 2 weeks ago, and EMH was sending employees PR emails on how to deal with it. the delay in publishing raises the possibility of pressure on the journalist and/or the newspaper.
Yes…Hood is part of the cover up. A pedophile working in a mental health hospital, with children??? Is that surreal, or what?
Forget the money, forget the deterioration of patient care, forget the lying…It is nothing compared to letting that employee continue working at Acadia…That by itself is a CRIME.
Did you hear Board of Trustees? It is a CRIME. You all received, like Hood, the same letter from Tisher, reporting that the same employee, suspected of pedophilia, is still working at Acadia. Tisher, out of desperation, wrote a letter about it to you and Hood. What did you do about it?
Oh, now I remember. Indeed you took action…by not taking action, when the whistle blower (Tisher) was fired.
Same old same old…the Catholic Church, the sports team coaches…and now, a mental health hospital…What an outrage.
At least the BDN published the story. As I mentioned above, the two biggest newspapers in the state of Minnesota don’t find any of what’s happened at the Minnesota Security Hospital recently to be worth reporting on. For Pete’s sake, a patient on Tuesday escaped and another one stabbed his mother two dozen times while on a pass and is now charged with attempted murder, and neither the Star Tribune (Minneapolis) nor the Pioneer Press (St. Paul) reported on it on Tuesday and there’s not a line in the Star Tribune as of this day. I really smell a cover-up. Of course, the incompetents responsible for not getting rid of Proffitt when they should have work and reside in the Twin Cities, namely they work at the State Capitol in St. Paul. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s happening here.
Michell Hood, how can you so blantently lie and expect that we are so stupid. Typical politician…thinking all of us are morons. You screwed up and should resign just like you made Proffitt resign. We have at Acadia been abused and mistreated. In 5 years, I have had a whole .70 cents raise. How many thousands of dollars have you been raised. I have broken bones, ripped cartilege, and bad knees because of your bad decision to hire Proffitt. Served 20 years in the military and have been shot at and scudded and never got a splinter. Worked 5 years at Acadia and have been to the emergency room five times and I am support staff! A whole .70 cents doesn’t cover what I’ve been through and your’s and David Proffitt’s salaries are rediculous. Hope you both invested well, cause I hope your days are numbered in your positions. You’ve ripped us off enough.
Hood is a liar. She lies every time she talks. Lies just flow out of her mouth, naturally.
She lied every time she met with the medical staff. After Proffitt was fired, she refused to give an explanation why it took her so long to get rid of him. When it was pointed to her that Proffitt was creating a hostile and uncivil work environment she stated: “oh, I was not aware of that.” She came and talked for 90 mns how she was going to get medical staff actively involved in recruiting a new CEO. Yes, sure. we woke up one of those mornings with Coffey as the CEO. No warning, nothing. Prior to being appointed, he didn’t even bother to come and introduce himself. Hood is either incompetent for this job, or she is a female sociopath.
Hood is lying is right. I worked here five years maybe seven lost count after four years. But she is lying alot. I resigned after i was told i was get a raise from 14.55 a hour to 15.90. I was getting sick of being abused by patients, that i know have issues but the safety conditions were horrible.
Thank you, BDN, for finally tackling this story in some depth. The cheerleading and self-serving trustees’ comments notwithstanding, this is an unbelievable (but true) story of corporate nonprofit mismanagement. The Minnesota Commissioner (who probably gets paid a fraction of what Ms. Hood is paid) did the right thing and disposed of Mr. Proffitt after 7 months. Ms. Hood, who had the sole power to hire and fire Proffitt, kept him on for two long years after she had clear and convincing evidence from Dr. Tisher and the medical staff that he was destroying the moral fabric of the hospital. This, despite the fact that the hospital continued to incurr huge staff losses and had serious and unprecedented regulatory problems. And that the staff begged her to get Proffit out of the hospital. Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems claims among its core values “integrity” (“We commit to the highest standards of behavior and doing the correct thing for the right reasons.”) and “accountability”. For Ms. Hood to fail to accept personal responsibility for the damage done to Acadia Hospital, its staff, and its patients, and for the EMHS Board to fail to hold her accountable, flies in the face of these values. And diminishes everyone associated with EMHS.
veryconcered02, before you give the Minnesota Commissioner a pat on the back for getting rid of Proffitt you should know that she (Lucinda Jesson) met with the majority of the psychiatrists at the end of 2011 and there was full disclosure to her at that meeting about David Proffitt and how he was behaving. The psychiatrists wanted him out after he wrongfully terminated both one of the forensic psychiatrists and a very experienced RN, and for creating a hostile work environment. A leopard doesn’t changes its spots. Despite being made aware that Proffitt was similarly destroying the moral fabric of MSH, she did absolutely nothing. Her inaction led to the mass exodus of the entire psychiatric staff. Hundreds of years of experience walked out the door, from Jennifer Service, the medical director of 8 years, to the other 3 forensic psychiatrists, to the child and adolescent psychiatrist, to the double-boarded in family practice and psychiatry psychiatrist – all of them gone. Hundreds of years of experience. And who is there now, at the State’s only hospital for the criminally insane? Not a single forensic psychiatrist, and certainly not nearly enough psychiatric staff to adequately care for 400 patients. Not only has OSHA visited MSH since the psychiatric staff’s departure, The Joint Commission has as well. Two patients have died and their autopsy results are being awaited. On Tuesday this week, on patient walked away from the facility and was not captured until 22 hours later. On that same day another patient who was out on a pass met with his elderly mother in a park and viciously stabbed her about the head, face, and neck almost two dozen times. That Deputy Commissioner Anne Barry has publicly stated the hospital was overstaffed and that the facility only needs 2 psychiatrists shows how utterly incompetent she is. I see that Acadia now has 21 employed psychiatrists for its 100 patients. Those patients are lucky. MSH’s patients – not so much these days. The financial cost of recovering from this catastrophe will be hidden as best as possible from the citizens of Minnesota. The only reporters that cover what’s been going on here are Madeleine Baran with MPR and the Mankato papers/TV. There’s no real public forum provided by those sources like there is here in the comments section of the BDN. For some reason, the state’s largest newspapers, the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press, don’t find much of this to be newsworthy. I thank the BDN for its continuing interest in a story that needs to be covered.
Proffitt claims that the future of psychiatric healthcare will be one in which the patients that ask for help do so expecting not to get chained to a bed, but he does not take into account the large amount of people that are sent there against their will, as appointed by a judge. He also claims that restraints happen out of fear (which is true in a lot of cases), but does not take into account any of the restraints that happen which involve patients with antisocial behaviors or with psychotic features, both of which the staff at Acadia have no control over. I could not even finish the video as I became more and more angry listening to him spew garbage out of his mouth over a topic that he clearly has no idea about.
Sometimes the behavior is caused by what the staff is doing….read my above answer to 123abcABC…..no matter what a patient is doing they have the right to be treated with dignity and compassion….furthermore taking the attitude that their behavior is always purposeful and therefor needs to be punished is wrong….it sets the patient up for abuse….while in restraint and drugged I was physically abused by a nurse….my doctor walked in and caught her…..nothing happened to her yet I was treated like a piece of meat….restraint and seclusion gives the psychotic caregiver an avenue for abuse….while I will concede that most psychiatric workers are not sicker than their patients, some are and pity the psychiatric patient that gets stuck with one….as far as I am concerned if what was done to me in that place is their version of sane then I will take crazy any day……
Why anyone gives Proffitt a single second of attention and listens to him as if the words that are coming out of his mouth are meaningful is beyond comprehension. Do you know that despite being forced out of his CEO position at the Minnesota Security Hospital in March, he is still on the payroll, still involved in the State’s mental health system? Of course it’s all very hush hush but I’m starting to think that this guy is the world’s best con man! The powers that be at the Minnesota Dept. of Human Services should be ashamed that they’ve been taken in, over and over again, by this disgusting human.
Doesn’t maligned mean harmful, evil, untrue allegations were made? I think the word maligned is misused here, since all evidence seems to show all allegations about Proffitt are indeed true.
I would like to say that after reading this article I am very angry to see Acadia Management wasted money on the geriatric unit. The IRS reports state that Acadia “ended up in the black every year”. STAFF HAVE NOT HAD A RAISE IN 3 YEARS !!!!. Morale is at an all time low, despite the facade they may present.
Acadia Hospital is on a positive PR campaign. Acadia Hospital recently approved the hire of a Mental Health Liason in the Bangor Police Department. You think the hospital would have offered that position to a current employee, so that they could have the opportunity to make more money ? They came to the rescue of the BPD in order to have it published in the paper. I was told by a BDN employee that Acadia Hospital cancelled it’s subscription to the BDN, due to the articles being written in the paper. They put their needs for positive PR ahead of the patients rights to read news that is going on in the world, and keep them reality based. In addition, why is Acadia Hospital bailing out the city of Bangor for that position? That is a taxpayers responsibility. YOUR CURRENT EMPLOYEES HAVE NOT HAD A RAISE IN 3 YEARS !!!
This article is misleading. It puts Proffitt and Coffey in the fore front of this issue. The reality is that Proffitt is a sick person (sociopath) and Coffey just inherited a big mess.
Guess who is hiding behind?
Hood.
Hood needs to answer questions. She needs to be held accountable. She needs to go.
There is definitely some seriously misleading financial accounting reported to Mr Walsh by Acadia. A non profit psychiatric hospital the size of Acadia will never make millions, especially not during an economic and healthcare crisis. In fact, during most of the years preceding the financial crisis, Acadia used to be lucky for just breaking even, or being a couple of hundred thousand dollars in the black.
The truth is, the year Proffitt took over, Acadia received a large chunk of $12M from the State for back paid services covering several previous years. How was this money spent during the Proffitt years?
Let’s try to count together: $ 11.7K OSHA fine + ($ 212,335 + $ 622,431 + $ 2,244,304 for locum tenens coverage) +$ 150,000 failed geriatric unit + $ 500,000 rumored golden parachute for Proffitt + $ 300-500,000 rumored out of court settlement with Tisher + unknown settlement with Robert Patterson. There is also a financial cost, yet to be reported or calculated, of 1,741 restricted work days and 570 days lost to injury. What about the cost of recruiting 2 physicians who left after less than one year (one of whom had some skeletons in the closet that were not vetted properly), each rumored to have gotten $ 30,000 sign on bonus, including an additional $ 3,000 to move a boat! And there are many other unaccounted for (or un-calculated costs) of this flagrant corporate mismanagement at the highest levels of EMHS.
This is just food for thought for any future investigative reporting, which will hopefully be at the level of Minnesota Public Radio’s.
Yes, Madeleine Baran of MPR has been a godsend. If not for her, this debacle here in Minnesota would not continue to be exposed to the light of day. And thank goodness for the BDN, providing continuing coverage and a forum (reader comments) to keep this story alive. Just because Proffitt left Maine doesn’t mean that the story is over for the Mainers, clearly. And as for the Minnesotans – well, the story is really just beginning, is it not?
One more point: I wonder why there was procrastination in sacking Proffitt in the face of overwhelming evidence of corporate and legal malpractice. I assume this was to prevent the pedophilia cover up from coming to the open. Now that this dimension of the story has been exposed (by Minnesota Public Radio no less), we should all be looking at this crisis from this point of view: there was a cover up that went for too long, and the whistle blower was sacked. Just like in the Catholic Church.
just like any big institution whether it be the Catholic Church , Acadia Hospital, The Federal Government or State Government…..they don’t want their flaws exposed…..might lead to forced change and where would all their relatives work then? It is all corrupt from the feds on down and the sooner people realize that the sooner they will know their is no justice in the USA…..it’s all an illusion……
William Allen Schaffer was a strong supporter of David Proffitt. In his individual staff meetings and hiring of physicians, he required alignment. Like Schaffer, there were and are many supporters of Proffitt. These individuas remain in the institution and are are just as toxic as Proffitt, albeit passive rather than Proffitt’s aggression.
It is realized this article is not about Dr. Schaffer, however, it is appreciated that Schaffer is called out for his powerfully negative behavior, and impact on the hospital. Thankfully he was demoted from the CMO position. His legacy lingers in devastating manner to the institution.
I bet they gave him a great job reference.
Why can’t the BDN tell us something we don’t already know? I think it’s clear Proffitt was terrible. No argument there. And…he’s GONE! OLD NEWS. Why was nothing included in this article about the current steps being taken and positive things going on? Oh…I know why…because the BDN is determined to mar and person willing to take on any major employer in this state. Why Mr. Coffey would want to deal with all of this is beyond me. He had a great job before this, so my guess is because he cares. The hostility in this town and from the BDN around this topic is shocking. Believe it or not…there are lots of people trying to repair Acadia to offer a very important service to our community. Who the heck is this reporter? Investigative? You just dug up old information and re-hashed it to work everyone up. Bringing up old dirt is only going to hold Acadia back. Out with the old…in with the new! Also…so much information was not included in this story. Information the BDN has, but chose not to use because it is actually productive, informative and moving in the right direction. BDN…you are a rag. A tabloid. This reporter is known for this kind of dirt and has gotten in trouble for it in the past with inaccurate information. It’s so easy to point fingers and complain. Why can’t everyone work together and make Acadia everything it was meant to be? Stop stirring up trouble, BDN and report on things that are actually happening NOW. Your old news and your obsession with Proffitt is getting old.
Yeah, let’s not worry about Proffitt and Hood and all those people. Let’s move on. Nothing to see here. Cripes, I don’t know why we bother to talk about people like Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin anymore either when all of that happened decades ago!
I find it very interesting that EMMC management has been able to frame the Proffit disaster as being about him alone, and not about the multiple, persistent, on-going failure of their own leadership.
Yes! Here in Minnesota it is easy to blame all on Proffitt. However much he deserves it, there is plenty of blame to go around at the “leadership” level of the Minnesota Security Hospital, which is still firmly entrenched. That’s why none of the psychiatrists who left will ever go back. The takeover of decision-making by the psycholgy department many years ago with the subsequent disenfranchisement of the psychiatrists makes that impossible.
200,000.00 in consulting fees to figure out where we go from here? What the? Didn’t all these people go to college, EMHS and Acadia? All about liability now. Ridiculous. Here’s my free advice: Big smock, Tasers for all, unruly patient, you’re gonna get it if you come after me. I’ll take my 200,000.00 check now. Who was the brilliant suit-wearer that signed off on that one? Wow……..it takes two consultants at 100,000.00 apiece to figure out how to run a hospital? That certainly would explain why an aspirin at EMMC will cost upwards of 20.00 bucks. Nuts. So sick of fat cats sitting back, raking it in and don’t even have enough _________ to want to comment. Hopefully they’ll all end up like the ironically named Proffitt, unemployed. Maybe the aspirin will drop to 15.00.
waynorth1, Proffitt is sadly, NOT unemployed. He was forced to resign (or would have been fired) and he did. Laughably, he was kept on to assist with the transition of the new CEO, Carol Olson. I wonder how someone who had been on the job for 7 months and was an abject failure could possible assist with a “leadership” transition? Last I heard he was still involved with the mental health system but it’s pretty hush hush. Why these people in the State do not have the intestinal fortitude to send this guy packing is incomprehensible.
David Profitt’s departure from Acadia may have put that hospital in the position to consider recovery…but that has been to the detriment of the people of Minnesota. As in Maine, Proffitt was hired by incompetent administrators, (MN DHS Lucinda Jesson, Anne Barry, Maureen O’Connell, etc.) despite his track record of failure because of his philosophy of patient care. These ideologues refuse to acknowledge the reality that not all patients are innocent wounded individuals in need of compassion, but include violent sociopaths who are quite willing to maim or kill staff or other patients. Such patients REQUIRE appropriate constraint and a staff sufficiently empowered that they can act with such restraint BEFORE someone is injured or killed without fear of being fired and having the state attempt to destroy their careers by attacking their medical licenses and refusing to allow them even unemployment benefits as Proffitt’s handlers have done here in MN! The climate of non-restraint and undermining of employees encourages the most violent patients to act out with impunity. The results are clear…Patient Pfeffer escaped MN security hospital this week. While helicopters searched for him they spotted patient Ewing, MN DHS’s model patient, out on a day pass in a popular local park attempting to stab his mother to death by gouging out her eyes with cooking tongs and a steak knife! Ewing was in Security Hospital for bludgeoning his sister to death with a hammer in 2000. Patient Pfeffer was captured in the same park later. The next day a patient attacked a fellow patient…showing a pencil 3 inches into the sinus cavities of the victim’s skull! That’s just what has happened THIS week! MN DHS continues to follow Proffitt’s flawed restraints policies and cover up his inappropriate actions. He continues to be employed by the state getting paid over $44 per hour. Thank you BDN for continuing to publish on this issue. Without the track record of articles as a basis, Proffitt might still be in charge of the MN Security Hospital. Like the people of Maine, the people of Minnesota face not just an incompetent man…but a cadre of ideological administrators willing to impose an ill conceived agenda on patient care on the people of their states…regardless of the cost. We face a common enemy and must work together to flush them all out of the system for all our sakes! (Check our MN Public Radio and the Mankato Free Press for details. Our
state’s leading paper, the Star Tribune refuses to publish anything on
the issue because it would embarrass Democrat Governor Mark Dayton.)
Oh, I didn’t hear about the patient-on-patient attack on Wednesday. I suppose that the security counselors just stood by and watched, being terrified of being investigated and losing their jobs. Like they stood by and watched on another recent occasion a patient throw things on the unit like a microwave while trashing it and instead called the St. Peter police who had to bring in a dog to get the patient to cease and desist. In the days when the security counselors were at least allowed to do their jobs and not fear being investigated for every single move they made, these kinds of thing wouldn’t have happened. Where’s the “leadership” at that place these days? Hmm, probably sitting down in Admin in their offices, figuring out what else they can do to terrify the line staff. What a great way do run an institution – through fear.
When you fire someone for trying to obey the law (i.e. reporting child sex abuse charges) you are on a moral level complicit in that crime. A cover up is a cover up and in some places this is called “a conspiracy” and the people involved are “accomplices”. Michelle Hood is an accomplice to all of Profit’s misdeeds, as she failed to do her job to police his actions and insure that at a basic level people were following the law and at a human level that they were treating each other with the professional respect that they deserve. The board of directors also has a responsibility to oversee her actions. Every one of them received Dr. Tisher’s letter and did nothing. And no, resigning does not count as doing anything. It lets the problems continue and it shows no personal strength and integrity, which Dr. Tisher and the rest of his high quality medical staff are the only people in this story displaying any of that. In a not-for-profit institution it is not only the physicians that have any responsibility towards patients and patient care. Dr. Tisher stood up for his medical staff. He stood up for the institution that he devoted the majority of his professional career to. He demonstrated an unfailing commitment to his patients and to the mission of the hospital. Michelle Hood did the opposite. She should be fired. The board of directors should be replaced.
The other piece of the story of the high volume of temporary physicians that Acadia Hospital had to hire is that the quality of care diminished dramatically. There are organizations in this state who stopped referring their patients to Acadia because of a series of bad outcomes. Let’s here that piece of the story in the next article!