Skip to main content
Oregon State Hospital, the state’s highest-level psychiatric institution, has faced much scrutiny in recent years over staffing problems, questionable caretaking practices, and a high profile patient death—and it has churned through interim leader after interim leader.
Now, the Oregon Health Authority announced this week, it will be getting a permanent one: a Washington State health official named Sean Murphy.
“This is an important moment for the state psychiatric hospital,” OHA Director Sejal Hathi told lawmakers Wednesday, citing Murphy’s “deep experience in behavioral health, state hospital operations, civil commitment systems, correctional health, and large-scale public sector transformations.”
The OSH, whose Salem and Junction City campuses are now almost entirely populated by severely mentally ill patients who have been charged with crimes—or found guilty except for insanity—is not a simple place to run. “I’ve been in this business a long time,” interim superintendent Jim Diegel told lawmakers in the Wednesday hearing. “This is the most complex operation and organization I’ve ever encountered.”
But since coming out of retirement to take over last June, he said he’s leaned hard into a “culture of safety,” and after an organizational restructure in August and a series of new hires—chief medical officer, chief of psychiatry, chief nursing officer and now permanent superintendent—he and other leaders say a new day has dawned. “That is a wholesale change in the leadership of the Oregon state hospital,” he said.
Murphy, the new top man, is set on July 13 to take the reins from Diegel, who himself had taken over for an acting superintendent, the OHA official David Baden, who had taken over two months prior when the previous interim superintendent, Sara Walker, resigned after a 25-year-old patient Kenneth Hass fell, hit his head and died in a seclusion room.
Lookout Eugene-Springfield last year first detailed that case in depth, airing an unredacted federal review which shed light on systemic flaws in the hospital’s system of care.
The institution faced a potentially devastating loss of federal funds—not the first time this threat emerged in recent years—until the specter faded with the news that the feds, finding that the situation had improved, would let it keep its accreditation after all. (WW examined the hospital’s dysfunction in 2022 and returned to the subject late last year, exploring how the patient population has transformed over the past two decades.)
In the Wednesday hearing in Salem—part of lawmakers’ periodic gathering for “Legislative Days,“ Hathi thanked Diegel for coming out of retirement “during an extremely difficult moment for the hospital.”
She said the hospital has stabilized and was on the path to being safe, transparent, accountable, disciplined and high functioning.
At least one lawmaker seemed skeptical. State Sen. Sara Gelser Blouin (D-Corvallis) asked about recent reporting in The Oregonian finding that the state hospital spent two years before Hass’s death locking patients in seclusion with “alarming regularity.”
How, she wondered, could these issues not have been known to state health leadership, including the OHA director? Hathi, who has held the director job since January 2024, but has tried to distance herself from the hospital’s problems, said the important thing to emphasize is that its leadership team has changed.
“I don’t want to speculate as to why those decisions were made, why this was not understood to be unacceptable, why it was normalized,” Hathi said. “It’s confusing to all of us, and that’s why so many changes have been instituted to make sure that this never happens again.”
