He also flooded his room and even escaped the hospital. Peter’s Hospital in Olympia, Guinotte slept on the floor because he would use his bed frame to reach the ceiling tiles and knock them down. “He was going around climbing on furniture and taking the ceiling tiles down,” Guinotte recalled.Īt St. The longer he was there the more agitated he got. With no other options, Alan remained at Providence St. It was then the Guinottes decided that Alan’s need for around-the-clock care and supervision was more than they could handle. Then came his health scare and the trip to the emergency room. Soon, though, the strain of providing Alan care and supervision, even with outside caregivers coming into help, took a toll on his parents who both still work. That’s what led the Guinottes to move Alan home. The house was staffed around-the-clock.īut in October 2018, the agency providing care to Alan notified his parents it was dropping him as a client, in part because of his behavior and the fact he’s prone to outbursts. Previously, Alan shared a house with two other Developmental Disabilities Administration (DDA) clients. Prior to his visit to the emergency room in January, the Guinottes had been trying to care for Alan at their Olympia-area home. In Alan’s case, his parents never imagined he’d end up at Western State Hospital. “There’s definitely a demand for those beds and we pay close attention to that,” said Sean Murphy, the DSHS assistant secretary in charge of behavioral health. 6, DSHS said there were 19 patients waiting for an HMH bed at Western and Eastern State Hospitals. Not only are these patients being hospitalized unnecessarily, they’re taking up beds needed by other patients. Another three patients are waiting to leave the HMH at Eastern State Hospital. According to Washington’s Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS), 10 HMH patients at Western State Hospital are ready to discharge. The unit was created in the aftermath of a lawsuit filed in the late-1990s on behalf of developmentally disabled psychiatric patients who lawyers said faced abuse and neglect in the state hospitals.Įastern State Hospital in Spokane also has an HMH unit.Īlan is not the only HMH patient waiting to discharge from the unit. It’s a 30-bed unit designed for people with developmental disabilities and behavioral health issues. But because there continues to be a lack of community-based placement options, Alan remains stuck in the hospital.Īlan is being treated in the Habilitative Mental Health Treatment Program (HMH) at Western State. According to his family, he was recently cleared for discharge back into the community. Now, eight months later, Alan is a patient in a specialized unit at Western State Hospital, one of the state’s two psychiatric facilities. Prior to his hospitalization, Alan Guinotte shared a staffed home with two other developmental disabled men.
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