Top Doc Sacked from Maryland Psych Hospital with “Climate of Chaos”
At Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center, Maryland’s primary secure psychiatric facility, a team from the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors arrived on October 8, 2024, to conduct a two-day evaluation of processes, policies and procedures in the wake of a top-level staff shakeup after former CEO Dr. Scott Moran was fired in May 2024.
Moran, 54, had been barred from the lockup since February 2024 after employees accused him of online harassment. The state Board of Physicians suspended his license for a year in September 2024, saying that he had been “diagnosed with a medical condition which impacted his ability to practice medicine safely.”
An appointee of former Gov. Larry Hogan (R), Moran accumulated “years of well-documented but unaddressed complaints about hospital mismanagement and safety that had prompted staff departures and, at times, left employees and patients vulnerable,” according to an investigation published by the Washington Post on October 15, 2024. Among the examples cited was the 2023 death of Martina Morgan, 40. An investigation by the state Office Health Care Quality found five violations of standard procedures and two more state law violations—including the failure of Moran’s staff to preserve surveillance video that might have revealed staff actions on the night of the death.
Between 2020 and 2024, Perkins—a 289-bed lockup for accused criminals found mentally incompetent to stand trial—was plagued with “violent staff assaults, high employee turnover, security understaffing and persistent challenges stopping contraband drugs from entering the hospital, including K2, marijuana and suboxone,” the Post reported. Former social worker Christopher Yellen, who said no guards were around to respond after he was sucker punched by a detainee, decried the hospital’s “climate of chaos.”
State Health Department Secretary Laura Herrera Scott, who promoted Moran to CEO in 2023, brushed off responsibility for his mismanagement, saying she had relied on the advice of departing department officials. American Federation for State and County Municipal Employees Local President Patrick Moran, who is no relation to the fired CEO, said that members of his union who work at the hospital were “cautiously optimistic.” But the nonprofit Disability Rights Maryland said it had “grave concerns about a number of issues affecting patients at Perkins” that “change in leadership has not abated.”
Sources: Baltimore Sun, Washington Post
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