Maryland Health Secretary Dr. Laura Herrera Scott in a file photo from November 2023. Photo by Bryan P. Sears.
State lawmakers grilled Maryland’s health secretary Wednesday over a high-security hospital that has been riddled with complaints of patient abuse and violence, trying to get to the bottom of why apparent neglect and mismanagement continued for years before the state took action.
Secretary Laura Herrera Scott told members of the Joint Committee on Fair Practices and State Personnel Oversight that her previous staff “misled” her and provided inaccurate details of problems at Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center, which came to light after investigative reporting by the Washington Post over the past year.
“I received a very broken agency,” she told the committee. “It took me a little time for me to figure out that I was not being told the truth, and when I figured that out we started making changes in leadership and expectations and reporting requirements.”
Committee Chair Sen. Clarence Lam (D-Anne Arundel and Howard) believes that there were warning signs of the long-standing and “disturbing” concerns within the hospital, and possibly a widespread effort to cover up the issues.
“There’s a lot of history here. But within the last two years or so, based on reporting from the Washington Post, there’s been a patient death, a rape of a patient and a riot,” Lam said Wednesday. “I’m just trying to understand just how it’s gotten to this point. … It’s pretty serious to have a patient death, a rape and a riot at one of our state hospital facilities.”
Complaints of patient abuse and a hostile work environment at Perkins, which is in Howard County, have been ongoing for over a decade, but the committee Wednesday focused largely on complaints within the last five years.
Perkins is a state forensic hospital for inpatient psychiatric behavioral health care, with maximum- and medium-security areas. It functions as a behavioral health facility for those who have been accused of a crime and have raised a “not criminally responsible” defense, or for whom the ability to stand trial is in question.
Complaints over the conditions at Perkins started to rise around 2019, when then-Perkins CEO Scott Moran took over. He was fired in May 2024 following accusations of violent threats against employees among other concerns.
Herrera Scott told the committee she was not aware of the severity of the conditions at Perkins until the Post reporting came out earlier this year, despite an earlier anonymous letter to the department relaying the conditions there. After that letter came to her attention in late 2023, Herrera Scott called for an investigation into the claims, which she said “came back with no findings.”
“In each of the cases, they were not presented in the way they were presented in the Washington Post,” she said. “The death was presented as a complication of another condition, a chronic condition that the patient had.
“The riot was never presented as a riot,” Herrera Scott said. “It was presented as an altercation between two individuals that was taken care of on the floor and the individuals were separated.”
Herrera Scott visited the facility in December 2023, but claims she was given a “very staged” tour of the hospital.
“When I did go to the facility, what I got was a tour that was set up for me and what they wanted me to see,” she said. “Even when I asked to see employees, the employees were picked for me to speak to. I didn’t get to just speak to anyone. Everything was very controlled on what I got to see, unfortunately.”
Lam wondered why she didn’t press harder for answers.
“So you took this all at face value — of what your staff was conveying to you,” he said. “And you feel that was misleading.”
“At the time, what was presented to me seemed reasonable, so I didn’t take any action … only in hindsight did I look under the hood,” she responded.
Del. Dalya Attar (D-Baltimore City), the co-chair of the committee, believes there is a bigger issue at hand, even calling the apparent obfuscation by staff a “cover-up.”
“You keep using the words ‘misled’ or ‘misrepresented,’” she said. “I think this sounds more like a cover-up rather than being misled or information was misrepresented.”
Herrera Scott said that some of the staff who misrepresented the situation at Perkins no longer work at the health department.
“I run a very large agency, we have lots of people that are supposed to be reviewing the materials,” she said. “I had a deputy secretary, I had a facilities director and a CEO that were supposed to be doing their job and advising appropriately. And unfortunately, I had leaders in place that were, not only not advising me well, but were misrepresenting the facts of what was happening in the facilities. And all of those people are now gone.”
Lam asked her if she could ensure that everyone involved in the “cover-up” had been fired or no longer work at the hospital. She said no, as she couldn’t fire too many people “without decimating the entire facility.”
Some changes have been made. Herrera Scott said that hospital officials now report directly to her, and that they face increased incident reporting requirements, documenting everything from air conditioning and power outages to situations involving death, injury and bodily harm.
The department also hired a third-party evaluator to analyze work conditions and morale at Perkins. The department has some preliminary findings, she said, with a final report with recommendations expected Jan. 1. Herrera Scott also noted that the department is looking to hire new hospital administrators and improve staffing levels at Perkins.
Lam said the changes are moving in the right direction but fears a lack of urgency to address the issues.
“I would really press on some urgency here,” Lam said. “I understand — complex processes, there are a lot of folks involved. There’s no easy solution here, but we need to start with a plan to move forward, and it doesn’t sound as though we’re at that point.”