UCLA Psychiatric Unit Gets Full Accreditation : Medicine: Institute was put on probation after surprise inspection. It had come under fire after a patient attempted suicide.

The embattled UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute has been awarded full accreditation from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations, ending a 16-month period of probation, institute officials said this week.

“We are delighted that we are able to focus again on providing superb patient care here at the hospital,” said interim hospital director G. Michael Arnold. “We’re very happy that the commission has restored us.”

The institute, generally considered one of the nation’s finest psychiatric institutions, was given a conditional accreditation--the equivalent of probation--in May, 1994, after a surprise inspection by the joint commission, which serves as a licensing board for hospitals.

The commission would not identify specific problems that it uncovered in the inspection, but Arnold said Thursday that the primary problems involved insufficient documentation of the faculty’s involvement in patient care and in supervision of residents and interns.

Patients’ charts, he said, apparently did not adequately reflect the extent to which faculty participated in and supervised their care, even though “the same standards had been in place for every other accreditation survey” in the past without any problems arising.

The commission was also concerned about documentation of activities undertaken by the hospital’s safety committee, Arnold said. In all the questioned areas, he noted, the hospital has taken steps to ensure that all the necessary data is fully recorded.

The Neuropsychiatric Institute has been under fire since the attempted suicide about two years ago of a patient who was enrolled in the clinical trial of a new anti-schizophrenia medication. Researchers in the study took that patient and a number of others off their medication to determine whether symptoms of the disorder would recur once the drug was stopped.

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The National Institutes of Health last year reprimanded the two scientists in charge of the study for failing to obtain proper consent from the patients before withdrawing the drug.

Subsequent complaints by the father of another patient, who committed suicide at the institute last year, are widely believed to have triggered the surprise inspection by the commission.

The institute’s troubles continued in April of this year when its three top officials, hospital director Dr. Don A. Rockwell, head of psychiatry Dr. Gary Tischler and vice chair for education Dr. Joel Yager, resigned. All three said their resignations were unrelated to either the reprimands or the probationary status. Arnold, formerly the chief administrative officer of the hospital, took over as interim director July 1.

The UCLA Neuropsychiatric Hospital is a 168-bed acute-care psychiatric hospital for adults and children that also provides outpatient and specialty clinic services. It has consistently been recognized as one of the best psychiatric hospitals in the United States by U.S. News and World Report in its annual surveys, and was ranked “best in the West” in the magazine’s latest survey.