The members of the Miami County Commission aren’t the only ones looking for answers concerning the problems at Osawatomie State Hospital.

Concerned about coninuing problems at the hospital, the commission summoned state officials to what turned out to be a 2 1/2-hour meeting last week. What they heard shouldn’t comfort anyone in Kansas.

Increased attention was focused on the Osawatomie hospital — one of just two remaining state hospitals that serve people with serious mental illness — after a staff member was raped by a patient last October. Subsequent inspections by federal officials led in December to the hospital losing Medicare certification and about $600,000 a month in Medicare reimbursement.

The state’s response to that action has been less than satisfying. According to news reports, Kelli Ludlum, the assistant secretary of the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services, told the commission that the department had not appealed the decision but she didn’t really know why. One issue, she said might be, “We want to make sure we have all of our facts straight before we file the appeal. There were things that came out in the CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) report that we probably should have known about and didn’t know about. So there were some employees who were falsifying records, who were reporting checks when those didn’t happen.”

Yes, you read that right. Apparently, when federal inspectors were investigating the October rape, they found that an Osawatomie employee had falsified a record to make it look like the room of the patient involved in the rape was being properly monitored when, in fact, a required check did not occur.

That probably doesn’t sit very well with federal inspectors, but Ludlum sought to underplay the incident. There were no “massive lapses” in monitoring, she said, and no evidence of what inspectors called a “systemic failure” at the hospital. “With the situation where the rape happened in October — again not to minimize how awful that was — but there was a two-minute time period where that occurred,” she said.

So are we to believe that the rape occurred during the only two minutes that day or week or month that the patient’s room wasn’t checked? Even if that were the case, it’s not much comfort to federal inspectors, let alone the staff member who was raped.

Also at last week’s meeting, the Miami County attorney told commissioners that the October rape was just one of several felony crimes that occurred at the hospital in the last year. She has filed charges in five cases and is considering charges in two others.

What has the state’s reaction to these reports been? The possibility of privatizing the hospital has been raised, as well as the idea of just dropping efforts to meet what some officials apparently see as cumbersome federal Medicare requirements. Money the state is using to try to meet federal standards could be used to increase staff salaries and perhaps curb high turnover, Ludlum said. It’s unclear whether the money that is saved would be enough to offset the loss of $7.2 million a year in Medicare reimbursement, and the idea completely disregards the fact that federal requirements are designed to maintain an environment at Osawatomie that is safe and productive for both patients and staff.

Instead of making excuses and looking for exit strategies, state officials should be concentrating on fixing the problems at this important facility.