A troubled Western Slope mental health care center falsified assessments of its patients’ conditions for at least nine years in an effort to make its treatment programs seem more effective and to secure funding from the state, whistleblowers say.
The state overlooked what former workers describe as a long practice by the Grand Junction-based Mind Springs Health of intentionally writing bogus patient evaluations. The three departments tasked with regulating Colorado’s mental health safety net system failed to notice the allegedly falsified reports during a recent multi-agency audit of the center and over years of lax oversight.
“You’ve got to wonder how closely these so-called regulatory agencies are really looking,” says Sunny Sullivan, one of 29 current and former Mind Springs workers who have come forward to tell the Colorado News Collaborative (COLab) what they see as legal and ethical breaches.
Among the allegations, Sullivan and five other former workers say their supervisors had them and their colleagues fill out mental health assessments of patients they knew little or nothing about and hadn’t actually evaluated. The whistleblowers, who were not trained in behavioral health care and had no clinical licenses or experience at the time they worked for Mind Springs, say their bosses also told them to:
• Make up diagnoses for patients to justify treating them
• Diagnose certain patients with disorders they did not have in order to qualify them for costly, Medicaid-funded...
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