SACRAMENTO — In a sharp rebuke, the chairman of a powerful Senate committee on Tuesday admonished state officials for failing many of California’s 63,000 foster children, who critics say are too often prescribed powerful psychiatric drugs with little follow-up or coordinated care.
The scolding from Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsberg, who chairs the Senate Human Services Committee, came during a three-hour hearing in which he and Sen. Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina, chairman of the Senate Health Committee, demanded answers about the lack of conclusive statewide data measuring whether or not the drugs are successful in treating the youths.
“I would suggest it’s because the state oversight “¦ has failed,” McGuire told two panels of experts. “We have to do better.”
McGuire and Hernandez had requested the joint oversight hearing to discuss solutions to what critics portray as a broken system of mental health services for foster youth.
The hearing was intended to look more closely at the standards and tools used by state and local governments in evaluating psychosocial services for foster care youth that minimize the need for the reliance on psychiatric drugs.
“You can imagine the challenges our vulnerable kids faced when they were trying to access care within the foster health care system,” McGuire said.
The senator said he was having trouble getting answers to basic questions, including: How many of the youths had been prescribed prescription drugs? How many were taking multiple prescribed drugs? How many doctors had the youths seen?
“How can we treat them if we don’t have their medical history?” McGuire asked, noting that much of this data is submitted to state departments on a voluntary, but not mandatory, basis.
Officials with the Department of Health Care Services, which oversees the health care of youths in foster care, told senators they’ve been frustrated by electronic health care record systems that are not uniform statewide.
The hearings — and four pending bills meant to address many aspects of the problem — were inspired by the Bay Area News Group’s investigative series “Drugging Our Kids,” which revealed that nearly 1 in 4 foster care teens take psychiatric drugs.
The drugs are often used to control behavior, not to treat mental illnesses. Most are prescribed antipsychotics, a powerful class of drugs that have the most harmful side effects.
The four bills have already cleared the Senate. Next week, they head to the Assembly Appropriations Committee. If they clear that panel, they will move to the full Assembly for a vote. Should they succeed there, Gov. Jerry Brown will decide whether to sign them into law.
One of the bills, SB”‰238, by Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, could solve some of the issues raised by McGuire on Tuesday. It would require the California Department of Social Services to produce monthly reports on children’s medications and to alert social workers when multiple medications, high dosages or prescriptions for children 5 and younger are prescribed.
On Tuesday, Hernandez told the panel that after this newspaper’s series brought the problem to his attention he wanted some answers.
“The questions I have are: Why is it that this population is being prescribed drugs at the rates they are being prescribed? Is that normal, standard protocol? How do we compare to other states?”
Anna Johnson, a policy analyst with the National Center for Youth Law, told the senators that California lacks a system capable of tracking prescription practices about psychotropic medications for foster youth.
“Care coordination should be provided immediately upon entry into foster care,” Johnson said, noting that California can learn from states.
Her organization says Vermont, New York and Ohio are collecting data and reporting a decline in prescriptions of antipsychotics to children.
