Brooklyn,NY – HHC Chief: No Evidence That Patients Languish In Kings County Hospital.

Brooklyn, NY – After taking a surprise tour of the psych ward at Kings County Hospital, the head of the city’s public hospitals said yesterday he found no evidence to substantiate shocking allegations in a new lawsuit that patients languish in squalor and suffer abuse.

“I toured every square foot of the psychiatric inpatient unit, as well as the … comprehensive psychiatric emergency program there,” Alan Aviles, president of the city’s Health and Hospitals Corp., said.

“And, as I expected to find, there was nothing in my tour that substantiated the allegations in this lawsuit.”

Aviles said he toured the facility on Thursday, the same day the director of Mental Hygiene Legal Service, a state agency, filed a federal lawsuit describing the psychiatric ward as a “chamber of filth, decay, indifference and danger” where patients are subjected to physical abuse and unnecessary injections of mood-altering drugs.

“There is some major disconnect here between the reality that I know and that I’ve seen with my own eyes, and what’s been alleged in this lawsuit,” Aviles said.[nydailynews]