A psychiatric hospital in western Pennsylvania long known for its inability to retain workers has become so short-staffed that it risks losing federal funding for being unable to meet patient care requirements, Spotlight PA reports.

In an emergency request, the state Department of Human Services said Torrance State Hospital was operating short-staffed essentially every day. An outside expert who reviewed the department’s request to hire a staffing agency said its description of conditions at the hospital raised serious questions about risks for both patients and staff.

In the request, administrators said they had closed one patient ward on weekends and some weekdays, and they have required employees to work extra hours. Joel Dvoskin, a psychologist in Arizona and a former president of the American Psychology-Law Society, reviewed the request and told Spotlight PA that, “If my kid was working there, I would be really concerned.”

The hospital's staffing was the subject of a 2016 state audit and a series of federal inspections that all concluded that inadequate staffing was putting people's health at risk. The coronavirus has further exacerbated the situation.

“We are exhausting our overtime options and mandating staff to work,” the department wrote in the Dec. 2 staffing request. “Despite these efforts, we are operating below appropriate levels.”

THE CONTEXT: The coronavirus is posing the most severe risk ever to those who work or live in confined and closed spaces, including psychiatric hospitals, nursing homes, and prisons, where staffing is already an issue.

As cases and community spread have surged in the past month, more workers at these facilities are getting exposed, causing staffing shortages and, in some cases, leading to the spread of the virus on the inside.

Compounding the problem, many of these facilities have been largely closed off to the public, making it difficult to understand the severity of the situation inside of them. But we're working hard to tell these stories. 

Have you or someone you know been affected by the situation at Torrance State Hospital or another facility? Let us know. 

“We have known for some time that the results are devastating when COVID gets into nursing homes. Clearly one of the biggest mistakes made at the outset of this pandemic was sending COVID-positive people back into these facilities.”

— Sen. Lisa Boscola (D., Northampton) on Pennsylvania's decision early in the pandemic to order nursing homes to accept recovering COVID-positive patients