Another patient has died at the Unity Center for Behavioral Health, Portland’s clinic for people going through mental health emergencies.
Officials are releasing few details about who died and what happened. Brian Terrett with Legacy Health, which runs the center, said only that they’re not changing any procedures as a result.
“The procedures didn’t have any impact on the nature of the cause of death, so we don’t feel like we need to take any action at this point,” Terrett said.
The center opened in 2017. Two other patients have died there.
In the first case, investigators said delayed medical treatment was the cause. In the second, Unity staff hadn’t properly assessed the suicide risk of a patient.
Last fall, the Oregon Health Authority and the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services said leadership had resolved the center’s problems.
Unity is funded by four Portland-area health systems, Legacy, Oregon Health and Science University, Adventist Health and Kaiser Permanente. They opened Unity and closed their own individual centers.
Unity was designed to provide a more humane way of treating the area's most seriously mentally ill people. But a state and federal investigation found loose training standards and a situation where patients were sexually assaulted, hurt themselves and each other.
Staff have also previously filed complaints about poor working conditions at the facility.
