Study: No oversight of kids’ medication
Psychotropic drugs used to control behavior
WASHINGTON – One-third of foster children on psychotropic drugs in a sampling of U.S. states received no treatment planning or medication monitoring, federal investigators said in a new study.
The report bolsters concerns raised for years by foster care advocates, several of which filed a class-action lawsuit against the state of Missouri, claiming that foster children’s constitutional rights are violated because of the overuse of drugs and the lack of oversight.
Samantha Bartosz, an attorney with Children’s Rights, said the report validates the group’s work in several states, including Missouri, where she is the lead attorney for the lawsuit.
“It really places marquee lights on the issues of treatment planning and medication monitoring,” Bartosz said.
The report by the Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services says more than 1 million children are in foster care around the country, and 80 percent have “significant mental health needs.”
About a third, according to a report cited in the inspector general’s study, take at least one drug to treat illnesses ranging from depression to schizophrenia and anxiety disorders. Another estimate put the range of psychotropic drug use by foster children at 13 to
52 percent, compared with about
4 percent for other youth. HHS’s Administration for Children and Families oversees state foster care programs and doles out the federal funding to these programs.
Medicaid pays for a majority of the health care services that children in foster care receive. That includes psychotropic drugs, for which state Medicaid programs paid about $366 million in 2013.
HHS investigators selected for their study a sampling of foster children from the five states with the highest percentage being treated with psychotropic drugs in 2013 – Iowa, Maine, New Hampshire, North Dakota and Virginia.
Medication monitoring and treatment plans are two elements required of state foster care agencies by the Administration for Children and Families.
This sort of oversight is critical, the report notes, because foster children may move through many homes and be treated by many physicians, “which can cause health information about these children to be incomplete and spread across many sources.”
The result: too many medications, incorrect dosage, incorrect duration and inappropriate treatment.
The HHS IG, which cautioned that its findings could not be generalized to the rest of the country, nonetheless recommended that the Administration for Children and Families do a better job of helping states monitor medications administered to foster children.
Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary for Children and Families, responded to the report by vowing to look into what additional help the agency can provide states in this area.
He pointed out the agency already has a Center for States that provides support to child welfare agencies and no state has asked for help regarding the monitoring of psychotropic drugs taken by foster children.
Children’s Rights, a New Yorkbased advocacy group, said psychotropics are often given to foster children not for treatment but to control their behavior.