Grand Jury Gently Blisters Medical Care Oversight at Santa Barbara County Jail

The Santa Barbara County Grand Jury took further exception to the dispensation of medical care in the Santa Barbara County Jail this past week, especially for people suffering from mental health challenges.

The Grand Jury found that Wellpath, the private company paid to provide such care since 2017, experienced so many vacancies for so many days running that the quality of inmate care was called into question. The Sheriff’s Office — charged with ensuring the contract is adhered to — was contractually entitled to as much as $135,000 in rebates because of Wellpath’s failure to maintain minimum staffing levels, but the Sheriff’s Office failed to take advantage of this. The Grand Jury found there was no evidence to indicate the Sheriff’s Office was aware of how extensive these vacancies were; the records are clear, however, that the Sheriff’s Office never once adjusted its monthly payments to reflect these shortages.

Health care at the county jail has emerged as an increasingly persistent logistical and political problem, as Wellpath’s contract has expired but will all but certainly extended for one more year. Mental health advocates have been long complaining about the poor attention paid to inmates with mental-health challenges, which could be as high as 60 percent of the inmate population.

The Grand Jury disagreed with a prior grand jury recommendation that mental-health professionals needed to be on call at the county jail 24/7, saying that wasn’t the best use of resources. Instead, it called for one of the county’s mental-health Crisis Response Teams to be stationed in the county jail during evening hours. To date, this not happened, because the union representing these mental-health workers has objected and the dispute remains unresolved.

The Grand Jury said the understaffing and lack of administrative oversight happened at a time the county jail was scrambling to respond to a major lawsuit alleging inadequate treatment of mentally ill inmates, COVID, and the opening of the new jail in North County.

Although Sheriff Brown has taken pains to praise Wellpath as an exceptional partner — calling their exertions “heroic” — county supervisors are at the end of their collective ropes. Increasingly, they are looking hard at the possibility of assigning jail medical care to the county’s own Public Health Department. That department provided this service until 2009. The new chief of county public health, Dr. Mouhanad Hammami, in his previous job in Wayne County, Michigan, was responsible for running four county jails in Detroit.