A spokesperson for the Kansas Department for Children and Families says the agency plans to heed Gov. Sam Brownback’s call for cutting $3.9 million from its fiscal year 2015 budget by delaying a planned upgrade of its computer system.

One of Kansas’ largest early childhood development programs has decided not to reapply for nearly $1 million in Early Head Start funding because of difficulties dealing with a state agency. “This wasn’t something we wanted to do,” said Teresa Rupp, longtime executive director at Child Start, a Wichita-based program that provides Head Start and Early Head Start services for 981 low-income children in Butler, Cowley, Sedgwick and Sumner counties. The decision, Rupp said, was driven in large part by Child Start’s increasing frustration with auditors from the Kansas Department for Children and Families. “Things just got to a point where we were having to spend more on administration than we used to and less on the children than we used to,” she said. “It’s very unfortunate.” [row class="row-fluid"][col class="span8"]The funding — $949,392 for this state fiscal year — had been used to finance full-year services for 90 children, from birth to age 3. Those slots are now gone, Rupp said. Prior to July 1, Child Start had 254 pregnant women, babies and toddlers in its Early Head Start program. Now it has 164. Child Start also has 817 children in its Head Start program for ages 3 to 5. The 90 eliminated slots had been financed primarily by a federal block grant administered by DCF. The remaining 164 Early Head Start slots are funded under a different arrangement with the Office of Head Start in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Rupp said that in August 2013, two DCF auditors spent almost a week at Child Start “looking…...

Karen Barezinsky is looking for an answer to what she says is a simple question: Are the people who run Kansas’ Medicaid program planning to cut the supports she and her husband use to keep her son, Ray Santin, who’s paralyzed from his neck down, out of a nursing home? “I can’t find out anything,” said Karen, 62, who lives in Scranton, Kansas, with her husband and son. “I leave messages with Ray’s case manager, but nobody calls me back.” Karen is worried because she’s read news stories about Gov. Sam Brownback and Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services Secretary Kari Bruffett warning legislators that a recent ruling by the U.S. Department of Labor could cause reductions of in-home services for some people with disabilities and frail elders. That could send some of them to nursing homes, which typically are more expensive than community-based settings. The new rule, due to take effect Jan. 1, 2015, requires state Medicaid programs to pay home care workers minimum wage and overtime. That reverses policies in place since the mid-1970s that considered them “elder sitters,” a term for paid companions whose primary responsibility involved staying with someone who is elderly or disabled. Medicaid provides health coverage for about 420,000 low-income and disabled Kansas adults and children. Approximately 11,000 Kansans — primarily disabled adults and frail elders — receive Medicaid-funded in-home services. In Kansas, complying with the new rule is expected to cost the state an additional $13 million to $16 million annually. Bruffett and Brownback both have said KDADS doesn’t have that money in its…...

A Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services official said Thursday that the agency has identified 11 communities that appear to be referring inordinate numbers of patients to the state hospitals for mentally ill or have above-average numbers of inmates in the state’s correctional systems who are known to be mentally ill. “We’ve been going out and meeting with people in those communities,” said KDADS Assistant Secretary Lea Taylor, addressing a statewide conference in Lawrence on law enforcement training and mental health crises. The meetings, Taylor said, are meant to give leaders in those communities time to explore the possibility of applying for $425,000 in state-funded grants aimed at reducing the number of mentally ill adults ending up in jail, prison or the state-run hospitals in Larned or Osawatomie. Taylor declined to identify the communities. KDADS, she said, will issue a formal request for grant proposals “in the next month or so.” The application process, Taylor said, will be open to organizations — public and private, local and regional — throughout the state. A time frame for awarding the grants has not been decided. The $425,000 is part of a $9.5 million mental health initiative announced by Gov. Sam Brownback in May. KDADS on Tuesday unveiled its plan for spending $75,000 on training projects to help law enforcement officers respond to crisis calls involving the mentally ill. KDADS, Taylor said, has been especially pleased with its conversion of Rainbow Mental Health Facility, a former 50-bed state hospital in Kansas City, to a privatized detox and crisis stabilization unit, and with the program’s success in…...

Out of the 8,000 full- and part-time law enforcement officers in Kansas, only 1 in 4 have been trained to handle crisis calls involving the mentally ill. Records show that 80 percent of the nearly 1,800 trained officers work in four high-population counties: Johnson, Sedgwick, Shawnee and Wyandotte. The other 20 percent – about 360 officers – are spread across police and sheriff’s departments in the remaining 101 counties. “We’re trying to address that,” said Rick Cagan, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Kansas. “It makes sense to have most of your crisis-trained officers in your metropolitan areas, because that’s where you have the most people. But at the same time, we have a lot of areas in the state that don’t have someone on their staff who’s been trained.” Since 2007, NAMI Kansas has coordinated annual conferences that link police and sheriff’s departments with mental health officials in their communities to form crisis intervention teams(CIT). The need for – or a consequence of not having – crisis intervention training was underscored last month when Ottawa police officers shot and killed 18-year-old Joseph Jennings during an Aug. 23 parking lot altercation outside the Orscheln Farm & Home store. Cagan said he has no record of Ottawa police taking the crisis intervention course. Ottawa and Franklin County law enforcement officials did not respond to KHI News Services calls seeking comment. ‘Never got a break’ Jennings’ aunt, Brandy Smith, said her nephew suffered seizures that often led him to feel depressed, delusional and suicidal. “He had them when he…...

OSAWATOMIE — One day last month, Osawatomie State Hospital had 254 patients in its care — almost 50 more than its optimal capacity. The overcrowded conditions forced a few dozen patients, all of them coping with a serious mental illness and likely a danger to themselves or others, to be triple-bunked in rooms meant for two. “It got really crowded there,” said Mark Hornsby, a 56-year-old Topeka man who was an Osawatomie patient earlier this summer. “In the lunch room, you were like elbow-to-elbow. And it got really loud there. It got to a point where I just wanted to stay in my room and not get in trouble.” With the patient count so high, many of the hospital’s direct-care staff were pressed into working one, two and sometimes three overtime shifts a week. “The place is over census and understaffed,” said Rebecca Proctor, executive director at the Kansas Organization of State Employees, a labor union that represents many state hospital front-line workers. “Conditions there are really, really bad.” Angela de Rocha, a spokesperson for Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services, confirmed that the Osawatomie hospital’s patient count on July 15 was “an overall high for the past 10 years.” This isn’t supposed to be happening. In January, Gov. Sam Brownback unveiled his administration’s plan to convert the state’s Rainbow Mental Health Facility in Kansas City, once a 50-bed inpatient hospital, to a privatized crisis stabilization center. The center would connect people with serious and persistent mental illnesses to community-based services, which are less expensive than state hospital care. The reconfigured facility,…...

In Kansas last year, more than 4,800 women smoked cigarettes during their pregnancies, according to a preliminary summary of birth statistics released Tuesday by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. The finding means that in 2013, about one in every eight births - 12.5 percent - involved mothers who smoked for at least three months shortly before or during their pregnancies. “We can’t ignore that,” said Dr. Dennis Cooley, chair of the state’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Infant Mortality. “It’s an improvement over where we were the year before, but it’s still way too high.” Nearly 5,500 women smoked during their pregnancies in 2012. Smoking during pregnancy is known to increase the risk of stillbirths, premature births and underweight babies. KDHE officials and child health advocates have set a goal of lowering the rate of mothers who smoke during pregnancy to no more than 1.4 percent by 2020. “We need to focus more of our efforts on smoking mothers,” said Cooley, a practicing pediatrician who’s also a past president of the Kansas Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “And we need to focus those efforts on the areas where the data tells us have the highest rates.” Other findings in the report: KDHE’s Office of Vital Statistics recorded 38,802 births in 2013. That’s 1,502 fewer births - a 3.7 percent reduction - than in 2012. Kansas’ birth rate in 2013 was 13.4 births per 1,000 population. That’s the lowest it’s been since the state centralized its recordkeeping system in 1912. Kansas’ birth rate has not increased since 2007.…...

By Dave Ranney KHI News Service Bryan Thompson Kansas Public Radio OVERLAND PARK — Gov. Sam Brownback signed into law Wednesday a measure that is expected to make insurance coverage for autism services available to about 750 children over the next two to three years. House Bill 2744 was a compromise measure that gained eventual support from the insurance industry and advocates for autistic children and was sent to Brownback for review by the Legislature before it went home on break. Brownback held the signing ceremony in Overland Park at the University of Kansas Edwards Campus in an event that drew some legislators, school officials and parents and advocates for autistic children. The signing was a milestone for the advocates who had been pushing for about six years to get legislation passed. “We’re very excited that it passed. It didn’t go as far as we hoped that it would, but we see this as a very important step forward,” said Michael Wasmer, a spokesman for the advocacy group Autism Speaks. More work Wasmer said he doubted that a so-called ‘trailer bill’ meant to clarify issues having to do with licensing treatment providers and defining autism would be introduced during the Legislature’s upcoming veto session. Wasmer said the new coverage requirements would mean about 20 percent of the autistic children currently without covered services could gain them. "This is a step closer, but we’ve still got work to do, and we will be there fighting until all of our kids have access to the medically-necessary treatments that they need,” he said. Effective Jan.…...

By Dave Ranney—KHI News Service   KANSAS CITY, Kan. – Gov. Sam Brownback today unveiled his administration’s plan for reopening the Rainbow Mental Health Facility.   “I think this is a winner,” Brownback said, referring to a Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services plan for privatizing the state hospital’s operations.   The plan calls for converting the former 50-bed inpatient facility to a 10-bed “crisis stabilization resource” designed to connect people with serious and persistent mental illness to community-based services.   The new facility also will have a six-bed triage and observation unit and a six-bed detox unit.   Only the 10-bed unit will involve patient stays of more than 24 hours.   The new facility will be managed Wyandot Center, the community mental health center in Kansas City, Kan. The center will subcontract with the Johnson County Mental Health Center and Heartland Regional Alcohol and Drug Assessment Center.   During an afternoon press conference at Wyandot Center, KDADS Secretary Shawn Sullivan said the agency had signed a three-year, $3.5-million-a-year contract with Wyandot Center.   Sullivan said that was about how much KDADS was spending on Rainbow when it was still in full use as a state facility.   Under the current system, Brownback said, too many would-be patients find their way into the state’s criminal justice system, “which really isn’t set up to deal with mental health and substance abuse issues.”   And he said many patients end up being referred to Osawatomie State Hospital because they’re in crisis and have no place else to go.   State…...