Why Should Delaware Care?
MeadowWood Behavioral Health Hospital is one of the largest providers of psychiatric care and addiction detox in Delaware. In previous years, it has failed numerous state-run inspections, often with little consequences, but now faces its first fine from the state.
In July, Delaware state health officials fined a New Castle psychiatric hospital for the first time, after the hospital failed an inspection in May.
The facility in question, MeadowWood Behavioral Health Hospital, was fined $10,000 after a patient escaped the facility on May 22. Spotlight Delaware learned of the fine after filing a Freedom of Information Act request.
MeadowWood is owned by Acadia Healthcare, a behavioral health giant based in Tennessee, which “lured patients” into its psychiatric facilities “and held them against their will,” according to a New York Times investigation.
In a July letter sent to the hospital announcing the fine, the state said MeadowWood “failed to meet patient safety needs,” leading to the escape of the patient. According to the inspection report that led to the fine, cameras caught the patient attempting to exit multiple doors for an hour and a half, before leaving through a loading dock.
The documents say surveillance footage shows the patients roaming the halls from around 2 a.m., until they were ultimately seen running across the parking lot at 3:42 a.m. Yet the inspection reports said the hospital did not keep track of the patient as it should have.
“Review of the video surveillance of [Patient 12] revealed that [Employee 18] inaccurately documented that they observed the patient every 5 minutes,” the inspection report said.
When the state interviewed the employee, the documents said the employee noticed the patient walking around in the hallways, and redirected them multiple times. But after 3:30 a.m., the employee told the state they did not notice the patient anymore.
MeadowWood’s parent company, Acadia, did not respond to a request for comment.
While it’s unclear the impact a $10,000 fine would have on the hospital considering its nearly $2 billion parent company, it is the first time the hospital has been fined by the state, according to the Delaware Department of Health and Social Services.
In a statement to Spotlight Delaware, Tim Mastro, the department’s spokesperson, said the inspection came after a complaint to state regulators. According to Mastro, the May 29 inspection that led to the fine was the first following Spotlight Delaware’s reporting.
Mastro did not answer whether the state believes the $10,000 fine would be enough to deter further violations. However, he shared the Delaware law that dictates how much hospitals can be fined for patient safety violations.
According to the code, hospitals are fined based on the seriousness of the violation, history of offenses and efforts made by the hospital to correct violations.
“A licensee or other person is liable for a civil money penalty of not more than $10,000 per violation for violations which the Department determines pose a serious threat to the health and safety of a patient,” the code reads..
Spotlight’s investigation detailed three years of violations against MeadowWood that were outlined in more than 400 pages of inspection reports going back to 2022.
Some of those violations included hospital staff without CPR certifications, slow-walked investigations into sexual harassment, and patients given a cocktail of sedatives to “control” their behaviors.
Additionally, the hospital had been accused of negligence leading to a patient death in five different lawsuits. In one of those lawsuits, the family of 24-year-old Brooke Dean, a patient at MeadowWood in 2021, claimed the hospital acted negligently after Dean choked to death on a sandwich while heavily medicated.
In August 2024, the family settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed amount.
More recently, the mother of David Tymitz, a 33-year-old man who died in 2023 while he was a patient at the hospital, also sued the hospital and its parent company Acadia.
A similarity between an unnamed patient and Tymitz’s lawsuit, where the unnamed patient experienced a medical emergency in the same window of time as Tymitz and went nine minutes without CPR after their discovery, was also discovered by Spotlight Delaware.
For years, however, the hospital went effectively unsanctioned.
In response to the findings, a spokesperson for the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said hospitals are given “every opportunity” to regain compliance after a failed inspection.
But they added that hospitals unable to regain compliance could be terminated from the reimbursement programs – a potential death blow due to the publicly subsidized programs covering more than a third of all Americans.
“Termination is generally the last resort after all other attempts to remedy deficiencies at a facility have been exhausted,” the spokesperson said at the time.