Reopening of VA Psychiatric Ward Questioned : Veteran affairs: Sen. Cranston asks agency to justify action at Long Beach center where five patients committed suicide.

U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston called Tuesday for the Department of Veterans Affairs to justify the reopening of a psychiatric ward in Long Beach that had been closed in the wake of five patient suicides.

The troubled ward at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Long Beach began admitting patients again Monday after being closed for eight weeks, although a federal inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the deaths is incomplete.

Cranston, chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, asked for an independent team of at least two psychiatrists unaffiliated with the VA system to investigate the suicides, as well as the decision to accept patients again.

“Please provide a justification for the decision to reopen the ward while the issues which initially warranted the closure are still under investigation,” Cranston wrote in a letter to Anthony J. Principi, deputy secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Officials in Washington and Long Beach, saying they had not yet seen the letter, declined to comment. A spokeswoman in the VA’s San Francisco regional office, which oversees the Long Beach hospital, said the decision to reopen was thoroughly reviewed and “very confidently made.”

The letter, although worded evenhandedly, seemed intended to speed up a federal inquiry that began in May after The Times reported the five suicides at the hospital between March, 1989, and last April--a number equal to the total recorded by all five state-run psychiatric hospitals in two year.

Three men hanged themselves, one leaped from a hospital roof and the fifth shot himself in the mouth after he was allegedly denied admission. Two of the hangings occurred in the locked ward, designed to keep suicidal, homicidal, violent or gravely disabled psychiatric patients under constant or near-constant watch. One patient, a 27-year-old Marine, used the shoelaces from his combat boots, which psychiatric nurses said he never should have had.

An investigation was ordered in May by Principi, second in command of the Department of Veterans Affairs, which operates 172 hospitals nationwide. Two inspectors spent nearly three weeks in May and June at the 1,368-bed Long Beach facility, one of the largest hospitals in the system. A report has yet to be completed.

Spokeswoman Donna St. John said the inspector general is already lining up independent experts to review the suicides, a process that she said accounts for the report’s delay.

The hospital’s medical director, Dean Stordahl, earlier expressed confidence in the ward’s ability to keep patients safe. He said the nursing staff has undergone a six-week “team-building” training session, and the ward has been upgraded with more secure windows and other security measures.

Once the training and renovations were complete, Dr. Arthur Lewis, acting chief medical director of the Department of Veterans Affairs, ordered the ward reopened, said Ruth Villasenor, spokeswoman for the San Francisco regional office.

“Every step of the way, Long Beach represented to the western region what was going on (concerning retraining and upgrading). Based on that, the go-ahead was very confidently made,” she said. “We are awaiting the results of the inspector general’s investigation, but that was not considered a basis to keeping a ward like that closed.”

During the eight weeks the ward was dark, only 19 of 82 patients were referred to other VA hospitals. The rest were admitted to private psychiatric facilities at a cost of $189,000, officials said.

Cranston expressed concern over whether the ward should have reopened at all and has asked the regional office to “monitor (the hospital) actively.”