State Sanctioned Ineptitude, Overt Conflicts of Interest, and The Negative Impacts On Arizona Consumers Of a Broken Legal Format and Protocol: Wherein a state agency, the Arizona Office of Administrative Hearings, acts as the ultimate authority over patient generated grievance issues specific to another state agency, The Arizona Department of Health.

             "Numerous state psychiatric hospitals have recently been exposed for violations and/or deficiencies in patient care and safety, including several that have come under U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation. The reports show that these facilities are not safe, sanitary or rehabilitative places." (S. Wagner, Director of Litigation and Prosecution, The Citizens Commission on Human Rights. November 24, 2007)

"What do you expect? This is the state hospital." Dr Laxman Patel, January 19, 2011, after I (for the second time) attempted to compel him to meaningfully respond to my concerns about patient abuse and staff misconduct.

                

Dr. Cara Christ.
Director, Arizona Dept. of Health Services
2015-the present. 

"You, Dr. Cara Christ , are 100% responsible for doing the right thing today. So do it, already." 

Since her appointment to the highest ranking position in Arizona’s public health care system in 2015, Arizona Department of Health Director Dr. Cara Christ has repeatedly stated that there have been “great improvements” in the state’s sole long term public mental health care facility, Arizona State Hospital (ASH). To date however, January 2018, Dr. Christ has never provided any evidence or information about just what these “improvements” at ASH are, in fact. This is of very real concern to the staff of this publication, given that Dr. Christ’s immediate predecessor (Will Humble ADHS Director 2009-2015) willfully relied upon producing a pattern of overt and untruthful propaganda that served to delay a subsequent process of critically needed oversight and accountability at ASH. Propaganda that defied the realities specific to the ASH operation, including but not limited to preventable patient deaths, the tragic murder of a young Phoenix woman, and a wide range of patient generated concerns expressed in grievance submissions; and as such, granted the former administrators of ASH further opportunity to continue operatinASH in a manner deeply harmful to the welfare of the Hospital’s patient community. These issues have been exemplified by the information provided in this blog since 2012, as well as in a number of scathing investigative findings of the staff of ABC Ch15 circa 2013-2015; (As reported previously in this publication, at least three preventable deaths occurred due to this fact). 

The following article was originally published sometime in the first twelve months of the life of this blog, PJ Reed The Arizona State Hospital Patient Abuse. We are republishing this information as one means to remind our readers of how dismally substandard the operation at ASH was circa 2010-2012, and in order to raise consideration as to whether in fact any legitimate improvements have in fact come about since Dr. Christ was granted directorship over Arizona’s public health care system. 

RE: ADHS/DBHS OGA Docket #H090611S0009 The Evolution Of A Grievance: Wherein, following over one full year of systematic suppression of my right to due process in relation to a criminally imposed sequence of administrative abuse of authority at The Arizona State Hospital, I prepare to go to hearing.

(Originally published June 15, 2012)

INTRODUCTION:  AFTER OVER A FULL YEAR OF PROCEDURALLY HALF-ASS DELAYS, THE ABOVE DOCKET FILE HAS MORPHED INTO A LEGAL CASE:  OAH #2012C-BHS-0338-DHS.  (THIS ARTICLE RELATES TO AN EARLIER APRIL 09, 2012 ARTICLE, "FACTS OF LIFE #1-4"). ON JULY 16, 2012, A HEARING WILL BE CONVENED UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF THE ARIZONA OFFICE OF ADMINISTRATIVE HEARINGS, WHEREBY I WILL BE REPRESENTING MYSELF ON BEHALF OF ALL PATIENTS, PATIENTS FAMILIES, AND ANY OTHER LIKE PARTIES OF INTEREST WHO CARE ABOUT THE RIGHTS AND NEEDS OF PATIENTS AT THE ARIZONA STATE HOSPITAL. THE MATTER TO BE REVIEWED IN THIS HEARING RELATES TO GROSS ADMINISTRATIVE ABUSE OF AUTHORITY THAT I WAS SUBJECTED TO OVER A PERIOD OF THREE (3) DAYS IN LATE MAY, 2011, WHEREIN MY FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT AS A HUMAN BEING TO REMAIN FREE OF UNDUE OR UNLAWFUL CONSTRAINT, COERCION, THREAT, AND INTIMIDATION WAS FLAGRANTLY ABRIDGED OVER A PERIOD OF SEVENTY TWO (72) FULL HOURS. THE ACTIONS TAKEN AGAINST ME IN THIS CONTEXT CENTRALLY INVOLVED MY PRIMARY CARE PHYSICIAN AT THE TIME, DR. PERVAIZ AKHTER; THE CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER AT THE TIME, DR. STEVEN DINGLE (WHO HAS SINCE BEEN PROMOTED!!!); DR. LYNN LYDON; AND STAFF OF THE ARIZONA ATTORNEY GENERAL, INCLUDING A SECRETARY NAMED CINDY FROELICH AND AN ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL NAMED JOEL RUDD (AKA “The Mortician” [PJ Reed], “Angel of Darkness” [Arizona State Hospital Human Rights Committee]).

I  have already discussed this matter in several previous articles (please see 4/9/12 "Facts of Life #1-4, specifically Fact #1). The unlawful misconduct of the individuals most centrally involved in this matter are some of the most powerful officials in the daily lives of ASH patients, as they represent the clinical office's senior primary care physicians and an administrative level physician, all of whom wield the authority to issue a wide range of administrative actions over any given patients' life at any given time; as well as staff members of the Arizona Attorney General's office, who maintain an office right  there on the hospital grounds- literally- and whom exercise an inordinate degree of power over a broad array of each and every patient at ASH' lives. Together, albeit it in clumsy fashion, these seemingly separate forms of authority came together and willfully engaged in very grievous acts of criminal abuse of authority in an attempt to force me into entering a contractual agreement wherein my fundamental constitutional rights as an ASH patient and as a citizen of this nation were very graphically at stake. It is my contention that they engaged in this misconduct in order to punish me for voicing my lawful right to be put in contact with my court appointed attorney; and when I refused to participate in the clearly unlawful process that they initiated in this context, I was further subjected to graphic displays of highly unlawful abuses of administrative authority that led to me being unduly restricted to critical level "suicide watch" (wherein the restricted patient cannot so much as take a shit without having a staff person standing or sitting within arms length), in spite of there being absolutely no clinical basis for the action. Through all of this, and despite experiencing high anxiety and associated duress, fear for my safety, and graphic indignity, I maintained my civility and fully cooperated with these actions because I wanted to be reasonable about it all as it played out, but I also knew at the time that things were clearly out of control in terms of the actions that these people took.

The most troubling element of the administrative abuses of authority that I was subjected to in this matter flowed from the willingness of the Arizona Attorney General's (AZ AG) office to actively engage in legal misconduct that basically amounted to a very unreasonable waste of tax payer money in the end, and unquestionably only served a purpose of imposing the duress that I experienced throughout the entirety of these events.

The whole sequence of clearly malfeasant acts against me began on the morning of May 25, 2011, when a secretary (Cindy Freolich) from the legal office there at ASH, which functions under the direct authority of the AZ AG, tried to unlawfully coerce me into signing a legal document that I was not required to sign, and then threatened to have me discharged "onto the curb out in front of the hospital" at the end of the day if I did not sign the document, despite me telling her that I was actively trying to consult with my court appointed attorney on the matter. Later on in the day, and after the  "suicide watch" had been unlawfully imposed on me, this same woman escorted a court server into my room, and I was presented with a sixteen (16) page legal document that didn't even have any legal standing because it was in direct conflict with my legal status at that time and the given authority of the Arizona county where I had come to ASH from. The legal document itself was drafted and produced under the direct authority of Joel Rudd, who in fact signed it, and this is where my approach to representing myself in this upcoming hearing begins.

Less than one week ago, I was advised by the Arizona Department of Health Services that the very long overdue scheduling of this matter for judicial review had been completed (the events specific to this case occurred well over a full year ago). Upon cursory review of the scheduling document, I immediately saw that Joel Rudd and the Office of the Arizona Attorney General have the balls and basic ignorance to believe that they will be representing ASH and ADHS in the case at hand, in graphic defiance of the fact that this imposes a deep conflict of interest onto the proceedings as they stand today. The original grievance document that was drafted and submitted on my behalf by the uber-competent (and, sadly, former) ADHS Office of Human Rights advocate John Gallagher, very clearly identifies both Cindy Froelich (by name), as well as the legal document prepared by Joel Rudd, as centrally involved parties to the chief allegations included in the grievance itself.

Upon seeing that Joel Rudd is the assigned counsel for ASH in this case, and on the basis of my instinctual concern that it just ain't right for one of the same people who subjected me to the gross abridgments of my rights in this case to be representing himself , as well as my professional experience, (I know a hornswoggle when I see one), I the appellant immediately submitted a motion to the court to have Joel Rudd and the AZ AG removed as representative counsel for the appellee. I did in good faith attempt to submit this motion via the courts own electronic forms and submittals system, but strangely enough, my computer is having difficulty communicating with the court in that context. So today, I faxed the following motion document to the court, and as per my obligation as the appellant in the case, I also faxed a copy of the motion to Joel Rudd. I really have no idea how smoothly this one particular motion will go, as the power dynamics are pretty acute (I am little more than an ant to these people), but I am intent on seeing that my fundamental rights(s) to due process and equal protection under the law are not violated, and that my related right to a fair and impartial hearing is preserved, as well. I feel that I make myself pretty clear in the below document, as follows:

OAH Electronic Motion Submission (Steps 1-9)

1. Your Name:  ------  (aka PJ reed)

2. Your E-Mail Address: ----------- (AKA paoloreed@gmail.com)

3. To: Administrative Law Judge K.A.

4. Docket Number: 2012c-BHS-0338-DHS 

5. Pending Hearing Date: May 17, 2012 

6. You may submit your motion by entering the motion and grounds on this form (see 6a), or you may submit an existing document as an attachment (see 6b). You may also do both if necessary.

6a. Motion and grounds (enter text or attach document): FIND ATTACHED.

    

6b. Attachment to be included (optional): Doc 0003 image

(Attachments should be less than 10MB -- smaller is better) N/A

7. IMPORTANT: Every party must make sure that all other parties are notified and given a copy of any motion or letter sent to an administrative law judge.

(See OAH Procedural Rule R2-19-108(E).) 

You may choose to automatically notify other parties by e-mail (see 7a), or you may manually send notices to other parties via some other method such as postal mail or fax; in that case you must enter those addresses in 7b.

7a. Additional parties to be notified by e-mail:  (Separate e-mail addresses with spaces) N/A

A copy of this motion (including any attached file) will be automatically sent to each e-mail address that you enter in the e-mail notification box.

7b. Other parties that have been notified: (Include name, notification method, address or fax number, etc.)

               A) Joel Rudd, Office of the Arizona Attorney General, by fax to: 602-542-4085   

8. Entering the word AGREE in the signature space below constitutes my certification that I have read the document, that I have a good faith basis for submission of the document, and that it is not filed for the purpose of delay or harassment. 

Signature: AGREE 

Upon submission, you will receive a confirmation page if your submission was successful. If you receive anything other than a confirmation page, 

you must resubmit your motion. Keep a copy of your confirmation page as proof of service.

———————————————————

IN CLOSING: I will be laying out the full procedural history of this case in upcoming articles, including a recap of the various events specific to this situation when it arose in late May, 2011,  and details about how it felt to be so graphically denied my fundamental rights to dignity, safe and secure care, freedom from discrimination as a disabled person, and my related right to not be subjected to undue restraint or unlawful uses of coercion, intimidation, threat, or any like forms of abuse of authority over my life. This is beginning of something, and it is far from over.

Please do whatever you can, oh reader, to support this cause. Patient abuse at The Arizona State Hospital is criminal and it is radically inhumane. Help me bring about meaningful reform at ASH and throughout the Arizona behavioral health care system. 

DATELINE 2018: The entire legal process in Arizona which is supposed to serve the interests of aggrieved citizen-consumers who rely upon state managed agencies such as Arizona Department of Health Services, including patient-consumers in the Arizona State Hospital, is convoluted to the point of being all but useless to such citizens. It is, in effect, a system of greatly disproportionate distribution of power, wherein the state literally investigates itself, rather then in any way offering a reasonably equitable means for such aggrieved parties to find remedy and resolution of benefit to their interests. As this 2012 article and others (Conflicts 1-4) to be republished in the next week illustrate, the vacuum effect of this broken system begins at ASH at the very point when a patient seeks remedy via the Hospital’s required grievance process; wherein a Hospital employee, e.g. a “patient advocate” who in fact is required to serve the Hospital before the patients as their given employment contract, plays the role of looking into reports of misconduct by other Hospital employees, be they lower ranking staff, or other staff who have inordinately more authority at ASH then said patient advocate, such as Hospital psychiatrists and/or Hospital adminstrators. 

One of the details specific to why former ASH CEO Donna Noriega had to do with her having imposed unlawful influence, coercion, and manipulation over a Hospital patient advocate and investigator named Vicky Fox. This unlawful influence was applied in the first stages of legitimate patient generated grievances, as described above, when Hospital employees who work under the direct authority of wrongdoers such as Noriega are assigned to investigate other Hospital employees. Granting such wrongdoers opportunity to surpress the data and dissolve the related merits of all patient generated grievances.   

In a recent meeting of the Hospital’s Human Rights Committee, which functions as per law independent of the authority of any state employee- including and foremost ASH administrators such as current CEO Aaron Bowen- a patient raised the issue of a grievance he had filed sometime in early 2017, his concerns at the meeting having everything to do with that submission having virtually vanished due to violations of timeline requirements. This is a classic means by which Hospital administrators and members of the state’s Office of Grievance and Appeals (OGA) willfully bury the concerns of aggrieved ASH patients, by overwhelming the efforts of such patients through overly bureaucratic mechanisms and related staff immorality. As it is, all ASH patients have very limited means in their own right to enforce their own rights in this context, and as such, they depend very heavily upon Hospital employees (such as Hospital employed patient advocates) as well those individuals working at OGA to abide by the rules- including timeline requirements- that dictate the function of such employees and offices.

I attest to OGA having played a direct role in thwarthing my best good faith efforts to bring deserved attention upon crucial yet ignored issues at ASH that are now known to have occurred circa 2010-2015, the barebones fact that every one of the grievances I filed during my thirteen months at ASH were mishandled in violation of timeline requirements. This was most evident when those grievances were patently rejected in the earliest stages of the grienvace process, standard practice at the Hospital itself, and had advanced via appeal to the OGA. Which is to say that hands down, it was OGA that routinely violated said timeline requirements. In the simplest terms, it is clearly the hope of OGA employees that patients will lose energy and interest in following through on grievances once they advance as such, via repeated delays and willful violations of protocol, and the radically long time process created by such violations. 

It was, for me, like shooting rubber bands at the sky, or conversely speaking, akin to raising my voice in a vacuum. Conflicts of interest, bureaucratic ineptitude, and the failings of judges working in the Arizona’s Office of Administrative Hearings are 100% responsible for just how and why unlawful staff misconduct at ASH exist with little to no legitimate oversight. Such misconduct arises throughout the employment structure at ASH, as personified by the misconduct of Aaron Bowen’s predecessor, Donna Noriega, as well as by Bowen himself in recent weeks. I listened to Bowen mid-December overtly lambast the function of the Hospital’s Human Rights Committee simply because they are willing (and able) to report issues as per their very obligations. It was very obvious to me that Bowen’s primary concern was that such reports would have any success of prevailing as per the established protocol. As such, he is willfully refusing to allow the process to play out as it is dictated to do in applicable standards of state law and policy. 

And he knows it. 

In closing, yet another plea to ADHS Director Dr. Cara Christ. If there are indeed examples of great improvement at ASH, please present these examples to the public in a detailed manner. (Cease and desist with vagaries. Please.) 

This is really all it will take to get me and my staff to back off. Well, not entirely “back off”, but it will certainly serve in getting us to believe on any level that such improvements are for real. Because to date, we simply do not believe your statements in this context. (How can we?) 

And nor does anyone else with a valid history of following this blog over the years. Said followers most definitely includes current ASH staff, and employees of your departmental office; well intentioned and equally well qualified individuals who have continually supported this blog since well before your appointment, Dr. Christ. 

paoloreed@gmail.com