Westwood Lodge Still Seeking Solutions

on 45 Clapboardtree St. recently.

Westwood Police followed up. They said a call came from Rhode Island and the individual was safe. He was 28.

What made this escape notable was that the individual climbed over the just-constructed safety fence at the hospital. Westwood Lodge is an 89-patient private psychiatric hospital for adolescent and adults.

There have been many walk-aways/escapes over the years. Hospital officials have been working along with citizens, police and firefighters to tighten up the hospital grounds. The new fence finally got the go ahead in an effort to increase security.

But the fence was barely up before a client-patient demonstrated how useless the barrier is against adolescent and adult people.

So far, it seems that anybody who wants to get out of the Westwood Lodge can do so with little trouble. Another inmate previously swiped a staff worker’s identity card and escaped. That was to be fixed; it should have been standard practice.

Similarly with the fence, there was insufficient thought. Obviously, this sort of fence does not keep most people from getting over it. All kids have climbed fences; the Westwood Lodge fence is just another minor impediment.

All the officials working on this problem are naturally working many more angles than a simple fence. No one claims a fence will handle the whole headache.

What all parties do expect is that the officials will bring real solutions to the table. This design of fencing is not necessarily the right one. It has to be more than a scare tactic. That is clear.

There are two groups that Westwood and the Westwood Lodge must protect: the private patients inside the hospital and the citizens who live nearby.

Some say a telephone hookup similar to a reverse-911 could warn surrounding citizens when a Westwood Lodge patient escapes. Wonderful idea; so long as citizens are told not to directly make contact with the patient.

This would be another help, along with a better fence design and many other approaches. No one measure will solve the hospital-neighbor problem.

Both have fundamental safety concerns that need to be considered and actually solved.

Problems that the fence hopper just reinforced is that Westwood Lodge and Westwood must keep working – even more diligently – on a workable group of solutions for all the people.

No one failed here; everyone learned again how hard success will be to achieve.