A shortage of staff in the state agency responsible for providing guardianship and other services to the Alaska’s most vulnerable residents means that it is no longer able to take on new cases the agency’s chiefs declared in an email addressed to Alaska judges recently.
The Office of Public Advocacy is legally required to provide guardianship assistance for people suffering from serious mental health issues and developmental disabilities, such as intellectual or physical or dementia, as well as brain injuries that are traumatic, along with adolescents who are transitioning out of in foster care or the judiciary system for juveniles. This includes providing the people with the basic services they require to stay alive such as medical and housing.
However, recent changes among guardians of the public — the training and certification process is at least two years and has resulted in the 17 certified guardians hired by the Office to have a caseload of between 100 and 97 wards, nearly double the normal of 40 wards for each guardian suggested by the National Guardianship Association, according to the letter received on Friday by Director of Public Advocacy and deputy director to Office of Public Advocacy director and deputy director to Alaska Supreme Court chief justice and the presiding judges.
“As we’ve been warning the courts over the past several years, cases of public guardians have grown overflowing,” wrote Director James Stinson and Deputy Director Beth Goldstein, explaining their decision to stop accepting new cases.
They then wrote the following: If public guardians were required to take on additional cases, without additional staffing The “wards and the protected individuals will only be given the appearance of protection since public guardians are ineffective. Public Guardian cannot carry out the vital tasks necessary to ensure their protection.”
These tasks include getting money to pay for housing, rent or medical care in the case of Alaska residents who are unable to make it happen on their own.
Accepting new cases, the officials said that it will expose the agency that is a an affiliate of the Alaska Department of Administration, to “numerous negligence lawsuits” and raise the risk that more public guardians could depart this agency “because they are terrified of being negligent and costing someone else their life, because their caseload is insurmountable.”
States law obliges public guardians follow the rules set from the National Guardianship Association, including the requirement of a minimum of one meeting every month to each ward.
“OPA is at risk of having its entirety of the Public Guardian section implode,” Stinson said in an email. “If I don’t make this action, we could have none Public Guardian section at all.”
Alaska court spokesperson Rebecca Koford declined on Monday to comment on whether the courts had come up with their official responses to this letter.
Stinson and Goldstein wrote in their letter that the shortage of staff is not the result of insufficient funding, but rather of the high turnover.
“OPA’s problem has not always been lack of funds or inability to recruit. The Governor and Legislature have been in support of requests for additional jobs. The problem has been the decline in Certified Public Guardians as well as the the time needed to learn and become a certified Public Guardian,” Stinson wrote via email.
Then again, Stinson cited low pay as one of the main reasons for increasing turnover in recent years along with a high work load, a declining number of experienced and qualified candidates, and a lack of growth opportunities within the job.
Staff turnover, problems with retention and recruitment have been highlighted recently as contributing to crisis-level problems in many state agencies which include that of the Public Defender Agency as well as the state office responsible for managing aid to the food system for public consumption. Other agencies have also cited recent cuts to funding as well as poor pension and benefit options, as the main contributors to the challenges facing workers.
17 public guardians quit in the last three years -4 in the past calendar year Stinson said. The number of guardians was at the point of breaking when a guardian who was responsible for 85 wards had be absent for a prolonged period of time due to health reasons. This forced the those guardians left to take on the cases, creating “an insanity-inducing staffing scenario,” according to the letter.
Stinson and Goldstein stated that it could be between nine and twelve months before they have the capacity to accept new cases as more guardians are certified.
The agency urged the court to look at a variety of options for interim solutions, such as establishing waiting lists, prioritizing new cases based on the principle of need and urgency and appointing private attorneys to act as guardians on a temporary basis and utilizing an additional pool of state funds.
This pool is already being utilized through the State Public Defender Agency, which declared earlier this year that it will not take on new clients who are charged with grave felonies at Nome Superior Court and Bethel as well as Nome Superior Courts because of the lack of staff.
Stinson explained that she was aware that the Office of Public Advocacy, in conjunction and with Governor’s Office is also looking into hiring more staff to fill positions at a lower level “that will help to take the simpler, but extensive, workload off of all the” approved guardians.
The spokesperson of Republican Governor. Mike Dunleavy said his administration is “working closely with the Office of Public Advocacy and the Department of Administration to determine the next steps to take to address the issue of a shortage of guardianship personnel” and added that the agency has already been granted approval to fill new positions.
“There are more details about this soon,” spokesperson Jeff Turner told me via email. He didn’t respond when asked whether Dunleavy thought that the staff shortage at the Office of Public Advocacy as being related to other shortages that affect different state departments.
This agency is working towards itself a goal of 60 cases per staff member in order to comply with the national standard. The agency’s 17 public guardians who are certified have been handling nearly 1,600 of the cases.
Stinson stated that the agency is determined to keep the existing clients, something that is “already an issue.” Its workload has been steady over the last few months, he noted due to the fact that as new people are added by the organization, others lose their jobs or get cancelled.
“The problem has been that these cases are getting more complicated and there are fewer resources available to the clients, so trying to find ways to meet client’s needs is more time-consuming and there’s lower-level staff certified to handle those cases” Stinson said.
The story was originally published in Anchorage Daily News and is reproduced here with permission.
