WHERE’S
THE BEEF? — PEF President Roger Benson tells state
legislators at an October hearing in Albany that the
state’s longterm plans for services to the mentally
ill and disabled and chemical abusers lack important
information. Also shown are PEF member Jeff Rohacek and
staffer Susan Mitnick. — Photo by John EptingLongterm plans ignore clients
needs, comments
PEF to lawmakers: State-services plans short on facts,
accountability
By SHERRY HALBROOK
Plans developed by three state agencies for longterm
delivery of services to mentally disabled New Yorkers
fail to consider the needs of those citizens, PEF
President Roger Benson told state lawmakers at a
mid-October hearing in Albany.
“The planning process has become the purview of
budget analysts, rather than practitioners. It is a
top-down process with limited opportunity for real input
on policy decisions and system-wide impact,” Benson
told members of state Assembly committees on mental
health, mental retardation and developmental
disabilities, as well as alcohol and substance abuse.
The hearing was held to get comments on five-year plans
that the state agencies are required by law to develop
and submit for review. Recently, the state Office of
Mental Health submitted its comprehensive service plan
for 2001 through 2005.
The plans are full of “selective numbers, broad
overviews of programs and plenty of promotion of agency
initiatives,” but lack the facts and key information
necessary to evaluate them, Benson said.
“The plans fulfill perhaps the letter of the law,
but certainly not the intent. This so-called planning
process often fails to take into account the extent of
unmet needs, the appropriateness and efficacy of services
provided and the critical importance of maintaining a
viable safety net of state-operated services. Such a
safety net should assure access to services and fill gaps
in provider systems,” he said.
Benson cited plans to close Middletown and Hutchings
psychiatric centers and to relocate the children’s
programs at Queens, Rockland, Sagamore and Western New
York psychiatric centers to adult hospitals as “the
most glaring examples of actions based on the bottom
line, rather than system-wide planning.”
While the OMH plan says the recipients of services and
their families should be involved in planning what
services they will get and how they will be delivered,
the state left them out of its planning process, the PEF
leader noted.
Benson also pointed out that the state Office of Mental
Retardation and Developmental Disabilities has not
submitted a new five-year plan since 1997. That plan, he
said, calls for allowing the persons receiving services
and their families to choose their programs, but offers
fewer and fewer quality choices to them. And the
state’s NYS CARES initiative has failed to eliminate
waiting lists and gaps in services, he told the
lawmakers.
It was impossible to comment on a plan for services to
individuals with alcohol or other chemical dependencies,
the union leader said, because no complete plan has been
issued since 1994 and no updates since 1997, despite the
state law requiring the state Office of Alcohol and
Substance Abuse Services to prepare and submit them.
“We strongly suspect that a current plan would
reflect extensive unmet needs,” Benson said.
He offered five recommendations for improving the
long-range planning for all of these services:
• Provide detailed data on unmet needs;
• Describe the services needed to meet those needs;
• Evaluate the appropriateness and quality of
available services;
• Provide regional data on consumers’ needs and
services to show if the full range of needs are being met
in each area of the state and identify service gaps; and
• Define a broad safety net of state-operated
services and show how it’s maintained.