The METO Settlement

Roberta Opheim: As a result of the Health Department Report, we determined that it was widespread and, in fact, they issued a… I believe it was 99 pages of correction orders and citations, one of the largest amount of correction orders issued to any facility. And at that point, we decided we needed a broader systemic investigation into the care and treatment of the individuals at this particular facility.

So we engaged a team of three of our staff members, all of whom had knowledge and expertise in the area of developmental disabilities and facility usage of various types of programmatic behavior modification programs and, ultimately if a restraint were required, that would be part of the program to define which would be the best one to use and how to appropriately execute it.

We spent about…over a year talking with the senior management of the program, with the hospital review board member, with DHS's senior management, and became convinced that the nature of that programming was so ingrained in their philosophy that they were unwilling to change and unwilling to see the problems with employing that type of programming. That then resulted in our writing of the report.