Outcry over audit delay
Review would look at doctors’ patterns in prescribing hard meds
SACRAMENTO — A Bay Area legislator is crying foul after discovering that a state audit he requested almost one year ago about psychiatric drugs prescribed to foster children has been delayed because a state agency supplied incomplete information.
“Our office is dumbfounded,” said Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, of the missing information that he said the California Department of Health Care Services was supposed to have turned over to State Auditor Elaine Howle’s office by now, for an audit that should have been released on Tuesday.
“Our whole intent was to secure the data to ensure that we are doing right by 63,000 children in California’s foster care system,” McGuire said. “At best, this an unacceptable error. At worst, it is the department trying to hide the ball.”
McGuire said he is calling on California Health and Human Services Agency Secretary Diana Dooley, whose office oversees the Department of Health Care Services, to determine what caused the delay, and to give the State Senate assurances that it will be fixed immediately. DHCS oversees health care for the state’s foster children.
The senator also noted that the issue “has been an ongoing pattern when it comes to California’s foster youth, and they deserve better.”
The audit will review prescribing patterns of psych medications to foster children in four counties. It is related to several pieces of legislation inspired by this newspaper’s series, “Drugging Our Kids.’’
That series revealed that California’s foster care system has come to rely on powerful antipsychotic drugs
to sedate troubled teens. But while a series of bills passed last year instituted many new measures to curb the practice, the laws did nothing to target the source of the drugs — the doctors who prescribe them.
On Tuesday, McGuire’s Senate Bill 1174, which would give the California Medical Board greater authority to crack down on doctors who are dangerously prescribing psychotropic drugs to minors, passed the Assembly Health Committee on a 120 vote.
But the bill has been strongly opposed by lobbyists for the California Medical Association, the California Psychiatric Association and the California Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry who believe education, not enforcement, is what’s needed.
SB 1174 still faces several more votes, and even if passed, requires Gov. Jerry Brown’s signature to become law.
“In order for the legislature to make data-driven decisions, they need the DHCS to step up and give us the whole picture,” said McGuire, noting that it’s impossible for lawmakers to make decisions on “a snapshot we all know is inaccurate.”
A DHCS spokesman on Wednesday confirmed that after its initial review of the draft audit report, the analysis “did not encompass all of the information that was needed to complete the report.” The department did not respond to McGuire’s criticism.
The state auditor’s office told the Bay Area News Group that DHCS “failed to provide us with two of three data sets that we had requested and yet had previously confirmed numerous times that they had provided all the data.”
Margarita Fernandez, a spokeswoman for the auditor, said the department has “not had an issue like this before — that we are close to (within) one week of issuing a report when the (subject of an audit) informs us that we do not have all the data needed for our analysis.”
On June 13, Fernandez said, DHCS confirmed it had not provided the auditor with all the data. She said on Wednesday the department finally handed over the information.
But Howle’s office must first assess the quality, accuracy and completeness of the data, Fernandez said. Without knowing its condition, “we cannot estimate when we can issue our report at this time.”
McGuire said this isn’t the first time that state senators have requested such data and not received an appropriate response.
Last year, he said that he, as well as Senate President Pro Tempore Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, and Senators Jim Beall, D-San Jose, Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, and Bill Monning, D-Monterey, requested similar data from DHCS.
McGuire said that data was not entirely accurate and that DHCS acknowledged it had made mistakes, and has yet to correct those data errors.
“This is unfortunately another example,” McGuire said, “of the state not stepping up and protecting our foster youth.”