SEATTLE — A former patient at Seattle Children’s psychiatric unit has filed a claim against the hospital, alleging that staff failed to notice she was being sexually abused by another patient during her stay.
The claim says the victim, who was a sophomore at the time, was admitted to the hospital’s inpatient psychiatric unit for an eating disorder in Oct. 2009.
During that time, a boy was also in the secure unit where patients were required to spend much of their time in an “activity room,” where they could not leave without staff permission, lawyers wrote. The room was supposed to be monitored at all times, according to the claim.
Lawyers for the woman wrote that she was sexually assaulted by the boy, out in the open, nearly every day when they were simultaneously admitted into activity room.
According to the damage claim, hospital staff was made aware that patient safety was lacking. The victim’s father, a police officer, reported that his daughter’s room had been broken into two times in first three days of her hospitalization and also warned he observed “some behaviors in others that could be a safety issue,” the court documents said.
The girl was discharged in November 2009.
Her lawyers wrote in the claim, “Sadly, (the victim) is not the first child-patient who was sexually victimized while admitted. Publicly available records confirm that (the victim) was at least the fourth patient in a five-year span to have been sexually victimized while under (Children’s) care and custody.”
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