Chicago Lakeshore Hospital plans to move patients from facility in January

All Medicare and Medicaid patients from Chicago Lakeshore Hospital in the Uptown neighborhood — described in a recent federal lawsuit as a “hospital of horrors” for children — will be moved, according to a statement from the facility Friday.

“We will continue to provide the best mental health and substance use disorder care for the residents of Chicago and Illinois while we examine our options,” the statement said. “In the meantime, we will work with the Illinois Department of Public Health and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services to safely transition all Medicare and Medicaid patients out of our hospital over the next month.”

There are no plans to close the facility, said hospital spokesman Andrew Mack. He could not say how many patients would be leaving the hospital, but described it as a “substantial percentage.”

The Illinois Department of Public Health did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Last month, lawyers filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of seven children who were allegedly abused at the facility, as well as on behalf of Cook County Public Guardian Charles Golbert.

The youngest of those abused was only 7 years, the suit claimed. The children, all wards of the state, were sent to Lakeshore Hospital between 2017 and 2018 because DCFS had, according to the suit, “worn out its welcome at other Chicagoland psychiatric hospitals.”

Among other claims, one patient was “repeatedly sexually assaulted by” a hospital nurse after the nurse showed the girl “pornographic videos of women engaging in sexual activity with each other,” according to the lawsuit.

Another victim was “forced to perform oral sex on his older roommate,” the suit states.

Staff physically assaulted another patient “by injecting her with a powerful sedative both when she had done nothing wrong and after staff had taunted her in an effort to get her to misbehave so they could inject her with the sedative,” according to the suit.

The claims of abuse were detailed in a series of stories by ProPublica in 2018.

In a statement last month in response to the lawsuit, Patricia McClure-Chessier, the hospital’s CEO, accused Golbert of choosing to “malign health care providers instead of addressing the root of this statewide crisis: a lack of state funding which prevents children from getting appropriate care at the right time and in the right place.”