Tell Psychiatric Hospital Management to Support Safe Staffing

PHOTO: AFSCME members call on lawmakers to improve retirement benefits for mental health workers to boost staff recruitment and retention in 2023.

Workers and patients at Maine's State Psychiatric Hospitals, Riverview and Dorothea Dix, are put in danger by unsafe staffing. As AFSCME Local 1814 President, Sally Nichols, wrote in an op-ed this past May, low staffing levels at Riverview, which houses some of the state’s most severely mental ill and violent patients, has led to several violent assaults on workers that required emergency medical care.

Tell Acting DHHS Commissioner Sara Gagne-Holmes to improve staffing at Riverview

Please take a moment to e-mail Sara Gagne-Holmes, the Acting Commissioner of the Department of Health and Human Services who has been nominated to be the Commissioner, and tell her that we as community members are concerned about the safety of the frontline staff and patients at these mental health facilities.

Earlier this year, staffing was so low that the management was begging people to come in and fill dozens of vacant shifts each weekend. Staff would come to work to a unit that should have eight people, to find only two mental health workers available.

The hospital is now trying to fill slots by using short term, temporary contract workers with little to no knowledge of the facility, the patients, or the work, leaving the small number of full time staff to manage the actual work load.