We, the undersigned WFSE members and staff at the Child Study and Treatment Center, petition our agency leadership, DSHS Secretary, Jilma Meneses, Assistant Secretary at Behavioral Health, Kevin Bovenkamp, and CEO Byron Eagle, urging you to protect your staff and patients at CSTC by removing nurses from the census, and to have six floor staff minimum on Orcas and San Juan.

The current safety crisis at CSTC is untenable. There has been a sharp rise in assaults at CSTC and a lack of sufficient management action to address them. This is evidenced by the fact that since March 1, 2024, there have been at least 23 assaults on staff. As of June 7, 2024, there were at least 14 staff still out on L&I. This is unacceptable.

Despite repeatedly expressing our concerns and desire for management to address these issues, management continues to make statements to the effect of, “injuries are a part of the job due to the populations we work with,” “we are understaffed due to call outs,” “CSTC has about the same rate of assaults as other DSHS institutions,” “We can’t hire more staff”.
Following our most recent statewide UMCC with BHA, BHA said in an email that they would be willing to enact the following. We are asking the following BHA proposals to be implemented immediately.

1. Move the staff injury reporting documentation to the homepage of each facility intranet site.

2. Provide paper injury packets available as a backup for those emergent situations in which an injured staff person is unable to complete the paperwork at the time of the injury due to the severity of the incident.

3. Creation of a joint workgroup to review the current assault response processes and develop recommendations to manage and respond to incidents of staff assaults. This workgroup would make recommendations related to staff assaults for areas such as: guidelines to manage facility responding to staff assault, ward staff expectations during an incident of an injured staff due to an assault, transporting of injured staff following an assault, management follow-up with staff who experienced an assault.

4. Creation of a workgroup to address training concerns, such as, NEO, Post-NEO OJT, verbal de-escalation etc.

5. Approval for straight time or overtime if there is a clinical need identified for a 1:1 to provide proper care and treatment for patients or residents.
WFSE members have proposed several different avenues/solutions to address these safety concerns through all our formal channels. We have brought these solutions to management at our Safety Committee meetings, UMCC’s, both local and statewide, we’ve filed grievances, done job actions etc. All our proposed solutions could be enacted today.

We continue to demand that management implement our proposals, and we demand that management act now.
1. One to Three staff to patient safety ratio on all CSTC cottages.
2. Increase “shadowing” time on the floor OJT to 10 days for new staff.
3. Further and more comprehensive de-escalation training for staff.
4. Re-establish regular protected intershifts for all staff.
5. Labor and Industries campus-wide safety consult on best practices for safety.
6. All safety incidents to be reviewed at the safety committee and allow for WFSE staff representatives to be present.
7. Removal of nurses from the staff/patient ratio.
8. 6-floor staff minimum on Orcas and San Juan.

SAFE STAFF MEANS SAFE PATIENTS.