Federal authorities said in a Sept. 23 letter to Gov. Nathan Deal’s office that Georgia failed to comply with a number of key tenets of a landmark 2010 settlement with the Justice Department after an investigation into the abuse and deaths of dozens of patients. The probe was prompted by a series of stories in 2007 by AJC reporters Alan Judd and Andy Miller that brought the abuses to light.
Since the settlement was reached, Georgia has established dozens of community services and housing for about 9,000 people with mental illness. And the state has created community support and crisis intervention teams to help others avoid hospitalization.
But the feds said in the 18-page letter that the state hasn’t done enough to smooth the transition from state hospitals to community residences. It found the state has failed to strengthen hospital discharge planning, deploy mobile teams to conduct more in-person visits with at-risk residents and provide more services for patients removed from hospitals.
