Mayor Adrian Fenty has withdrawn a proposed $2.3 million contract with a Florida brain injury clinic that’s been the subject of hundreds of abuse and neglect complaints and was once accused of treating its D.C. patients “like garbage.”
Fenty’s attorney general, Peter Nickles, told The Examiner on Tuesday that the city wanted to “tailor” short-term, individual contracts for each of the 19 District residents in the Florida Institute for Neurologic Rehabilitation. All city residents will be out of the clinic by September, Nickles said.
The new proposal is a victory for Council Chairman Vince Gray, who balked at giving a full-year contract to the Florida clinic last month and threatened to veto the deal. The Florida Institute claims to be one of the only clinics capable of treating severe brain damage but it has yet to be Medicare certified for its work.
Last year, University Legal Services, a congressionally appointed monitor for D.C.’s disabled, issued a report highly critical of the conditions at the Florida Institute.
The report found that residents complained of being treated “like garbage.” A little boy showed a scar above his eye from “horseplay” with staff. Patients were routinely locked in isolation or given high doses of drugs to sedate them. One obese patient was taken to a livestock market to be weighed publicly.
City officials had ignored conditions in the clinic until The Examiner began reporting on it, University Legal’s report stated.
Thousands of disabled or sick residents have been shipped out to clinics and schools around the country with little regard to their health or welfare. The public pays hundreds of millions of tax dollars annually to fund the out-of-state placements.
The Fenty administration promised to remove dozens of children from a shock therapy clinic in Massachusetts by last spring. But the last resident didn’t clear out until the late fall.
Despite that track record, Councilwoman Mary Cheh said she was encouraged that the Fenty team was moving to get District residents out of Florida.
“I do trust him on that,” Cheh said of Nickles. “I had a sense with him with that, that this was something that touched him and he was keen to protect the citizens of the District.
“The sooner the folks get out of there, the happier I’ll feel.”
