Skip to main content
On April 30, Multnomah County corrections medical director Eleazor Lawson announced to employees that Oregon Health & Science University was pulling its forensic psychiatry fellows out of the county’s jails.
The fellowship’s program’s director, Dr. Stephanie Maya Lopez, felt “it was in the best interest of their program” to move its students elsewhere, Lawson wrote in an email to staff obtained by WW.
“[I] registered my dismay over the impact this could have on our vulnerable population,” the email states.
OHSU’s Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship program has played an integral role in providing badly needed mental health care in the county’s jail, where an estimated one-third of inmates suffer from mental illness. The psychiatry students would rotate between various correctional facilities, spending one day a week doing rounds at Multnomah County’s downtown jail.
The county got rid of its staff correctional psychiatrist years ago, and as WW has previously reported, no other psychiatrist besides the OHSU fellows has been working in the facilities since then.
An OHSU spokesperson said the fellows’ last day at the Multnomah County Detention Center will be in June. They’ll work in the state women’s prison, Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, instead.
“Corrections Health medical director Dr. Eleazar Lawson is actively reaching out to local psychiatry schools for opportunities to see if we can set up a similar fellowship,” a county spokesperson says. “We recently hired another psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner and continue the recruitment process for our vacant positions.”