A trial judge opened the door yesterday to allow the state of North Carolina to move patients from an aging state mental hospital by lifting a court order issued a year ago in response to questions raised about safety at the new hospital.
Judge Carl Fox of Superior Court dissolved a temporary restraining order obtained in September 2008 by the group Disability Rights North Carolina and three patients at Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh.
The private group, which receives federal money and is obligated to monitor mental hospitals and take legal action to speak to problems, argued that the new Central Regional Hospital in Butner was unsafe and that state health officials hadn't used methods required in 2008 legislation to make sure that potential problems were fixed.
The group was worried about patient safety because of malfunctions of duress-alarm, paging and wireless-communication systems at the Butner hospital, which had already taken in patients from nearby John Umstead Hospital in July 2008.
Fox's order said that the two sides worked closely on the issues and that they have now been dealt with.
The state plans to move the first of 105 patients from Dix to the Butner hospital starting in November, according to a news release from Gov. Bev Perdue. The state's secretary of health and human services, Lanier Cansler, said last month that about 120 patients would remain at Dix.
"I believe that with the help of Disability Rights North Carolina, we have improved and built a stronger patient-centered system of care at both Dorothea Dix Hospital and Central Regional Hospital," Cansler said yesterday. "It is a partnership that works and one that we value."
John Rittelmeyer, the legal director of Disability Rights North Carolina, agreed that the state had dealt with such problems as improving the paging and fire-alarm systems and offering detailed logistics for transferring Dix patients.
"The operations at Central Regional Hospital really have stabilized over the course of the last year," Rittelmeyer said, adding that moving patients there "doesn't seem as unsettling as it did a year ago."
The transfer of Dix patients has been delayed several times because of concerns over patient and staff safety.
Some buildings at Dix date back several decades. One state mental-health administrator wrote last year that residential space at Dix didn't comply with modern building codes and that some fire-alarm systems dated to the 1960s.
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