Legislators urge Brown to sign bills
Measure requires health transparency, foster youth tracking
SACRAMENTO — Foster youth advocates and Bay Area legislators on Monday told a panel of state officials that the alarming conclusions of a recent state audit highlighting California’s weak oversight of psychiatric drugs for foster kids could be solved if Gov. Jerry Brown signs three pieces of key legislation into law this week.
“The audit is troubling because it points to the fragmented” California foster care system and its “inability to monitor” the medications the state prescribes to about 9,500 foster youth, said Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose.
The audit, released on Aug. 23, mirrored many findings of this newspaper’s series “Drugging Our Kids” that disclosed the state’s dependence on psychotropic medications to control troubled children in the state’s foster care system and the failure to track how the drugs are prescribed.
Beall said that one solution is his own Senate Bill 1291, which would require better transparency and tracking of mental health services for foster kids in every California county.
Senate Bill 253 by Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel, would create a more rigorous court process for the prescribing of potentially harmful psychotropic drugs to foster children.
And Senate Bill 1174, by Sen. Mike McGuire, DHealdsburg, would require annual monitoring of highprescribing doctors, and allow the California Medical Board to crack down on violators by revoking their licenses.
Brown has until midnight Friday to either sign the bills into law or veto them.
It was McGuire who called for the state audit last year, and who — along with Sen. Holly Mitchell, DLos Angeles — requested Monday’s joint committee review of Auditor Elaine Howle’s 131-page report released last month.
In her report, the auditor found that in many cases, counties weren’t receiving the mandated permissions prior to prescribing the mind-numbing drugs. The report also showed how counties and the state have, at significant rates, failed to track prescription data and that children have been prescribed psychotropic medications in risky combinations, higher dosages and without recommended follow-up doctor’s visits. The auditor’s report also revealed that more than a third of all paid psychotropic medications prescribed were for anti-psychotic drugs, which pose significant risks of side effects for children.
“It is impossible for the state to say how many youth are being prescribed psychiatric medications at this moment,” McGuire told a roomful of people during a four-hour-long session held inside the Capitol.
“And we are still challenged to be able to get an accurate number of how many youths are on exactly what dosages,” McGuire told Department of Social Services Director Will Lightbourne and Department of Health Care Services Director Jennifer Kent.
The two departments are chiefly responsible for overseeing the welfare and healthcare of the state’s 66,000 foster youth, and said they have agreed to the auditor’s recommendations to improve the system.
The consequences can be devastating to foster youth, especially those who receive multiple antipsychotic medications, placing them at high risk for obesity, diabetes, extreme lethargy and tremors.
Lightbourne told the room that changes are in the works.
“Over the horizon of several years we will see the results and practices change very much as a result of legislation that members of this panel have authored, as well as legislation” related to the issue that already has gone into effect, the director said.
As a result of the legislative hearings and this newspaper’s reporting on the topic over the years, Brown signed three bills into law last year that: expand the duties of foster care public health care nurses; require the state to identify group homes that may be inappropriately administering psych meds; and requires those working with foster youth to receive training on psychotropic medications, trauma and behavioral health.