OH: Parmadale death prompts Governor Ted Strickland to seek policy on restraints

Parmadale death prompts state effort
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Rachel Dissell
Plain Dealer Reporter
http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/1232791232151770.xml&coll=2

Gov. Ted Strickland has called for a single statewide policy on the use of restraints like the one that contributed to the death of a 17-year-old at a center for troubled children last month.

John Martin, director of the Department of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities, which banned the dangerous face-down restraint last year in agencies it licenses, will head the effort. Martin said he hopes for the prone-restraint ban to be adopted statewide.

Authorities have said the restraint, which holds a person with face to the floor, contributed to the death of Faith Finley at Parmadale Family Services in Parma, which is run by Catholic Charities.

Cuyahoga County Coroner Frank Miller said she suffocated while being held in the restraint. Her death has been ruled a homicide. Faith's death caught the governor's attention, Strickland spokesman Keith Dailey said.

He said the governor had "grave concerns" about how the teen died.

In a memo to other state departments Friday, Martin called for the group that will craft policy recommendations to convene next week.

Ohio is among the states that have piecemeal regulation and tracking of the use of restraints.

Ohio has no central policy and leaves it up to individual agencies to set their own procedures.

There also is no one place that collects reports of injuries, deaths or other problems arising from the use of restraints.

Agencies that deal with children and the disabled in at least 14 other states have severely curtailed or banned some restraints - most commonly face-down restraints. The committee also will discuss collecting data on the use of restraints statewide.

Michael Rench, deputy director of community services for Martin's agency, said the committee's immediate business will be to move toward banning more-dangerous restraints by sharing his department's research on the prone restraint.

The committee would then work to craft further policy that moves away from relying on restraints in favor of other more positive intervention methods.

Agencies asked for input are: the Department of Youth Services, State Board of Education, Alcohol & Drug Addiction Services, the Department of Mental Health and the Department of Job and Family Services - the agency that licensed the Parmadale cottage where Faith died.

Bob Bowen, a trainer based in the Canton area who works with agencies that care for children, the mentally ill and people with disabilities, said the new policies need to, among other things, clearly define the term restraint and set limits for how long a person can be restrained.

"There are more regulations on how to humanely treat animals than people," said Bowen. The company no longer teaches any form of restraint that positions a person on the floor.

The Children's Health Act of 2000, passed after a series of articles in the Hartford Courant in Connecticut, chronicled 142 restraint-related deaths nationwide, limited the use of restraints and called on states to create policies about their use.

Bowen said that most have not complied and that there has been little enforcement of the act.

Thomas Hemmert, of the Ohio Legal Rights Service, an advocacy agency for the disabled, said his group was looking forward to the state banning the prone restraint and establishing standards that move toward other intervention.

Martin said that moving away from restraints altogether would take time.

"It's a kind of culture change and it's not something that occurs overnight," he said. "It's kind of our approach to get people to move forward voluntarily."

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:

rdissell@plaind.com, 216-999-4121