Maryland’s top health official told employees that she is implementing reforms to address “critical deficiencies” at the state’s maximum security psychiatric hospital after a Washington Post investigation into chronic understaffing and violence at the facility, the Post reports. Secretary Laura Herrera Scott said that the allegations raised by the Post investigation were “of serious concern” to her and the administration of Gov. Wes Moore, and that officials were conducting a “top-to-bottom review and investigation into all aspects of policy and procedure” at Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center. The Post detailed how officials had ignored employee complaints about staffing and other issues at the facility for years, and how violence escalated in 2023 when patients brawled, a patient was raped by his roommate and another patient died under suspicious circumstances. The death prompted Maryland State Police to launch an investigation into possible criminal medical neglect that was closed without anyone being charged.
Hererra Scott's letter to employees could be a harbinger of increased scrutiny on Perkins. Separately, patient advocacy organization Disability Rights Maryland is conducting an independent investigation into issues at the facility, and State Sen. Clarence Lam, co-chair of the General Assembly’s joint oversight committee on state personnel and fair practices, called for Herrera Scott to come before lawmakers in a public setting to answer questions on the problems at Perkins. “This exemplifies an abysmal failure of leadership that spans multiple administrations and multiple levels of leadership in the department that really begs the question of why this wasn’t addressed sooner,” Lam said. “It’s unconscionable that the state allowed this to fester for this long.” Herrera Scott said that recent internal investigations at Perkins revealed a “severe lack of oversight” at the hospital and a “failure to follow standardized incident reporting procedures and protocols that obfuscated serious, life-threatening incidents.” In one case, after 40-year-old mother Martina Morgan died, police alleged that Perkins’s leadership failed to comply with a request to preserve surveillance footage that might have captured staffers’ actions that night.
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