H. Reed Cosper, the state mental health advocate, has sued to block the state from closing the Virks Building at Eleanor Slater Hospital, saying the move endangers the health and safety of elderly people with mental illness and deprives them of appropriate treatment.

Moving the patients out of Virks constitutes “a form of patient abuse,” the suit alleges.

Filed in Superior Court this week, the suit names as defendants Ellen R. Nelson, director of the Department of Mental Health, Retardation, and Hospitals, and Paul J. Despres, the hospital’s acting chief operating officer.

The 60-bed Virks, which now has only nine patients left, specializes in “psychogeriatric care,” treatment of elderly, mentally ill people with combative, inappropriate or dangerous behaviors that nursing homes have not been able to manage. It is one of several buildings at the Cranston campus of the state-run hospital, which cares for the chronically ill.

Virks is scheduled to shut down this month as part of a plan to consolidate hospital services in a central area around the Regan Building.

Nelson, of the MHRH, declined to comment on the lawsuit, saying he hasn’t yet seen it.

The suit notes that Virks is the only facility in the state devoted exclusively to long-term inpatient psychogeriatric care. Without Virks, Cosper alleges, “psychogeriatric patients who need long term inpatient care will have no option other than endless cycles of failed placements in nursing facilities followed by extended, clinically unnecessary detention in acute psychiatric facilities….”

Additionally, according to Cosper, state regulations require that a hospital with plans to reduce or eliminate services must notify and seek approval from the state Department of Health, which Eleanor Slater has not done.

Last year, according to Cosper’s suit, the state closed Virks to new admissions and moved its patients into medical wards in the Regan Building, which is nearby on the hospital campus. Some patients have been placed in medical units “even though the patient has no medical condition that requires hospital-level care.” Others have gone to Regan for appropriate medical reasons, and then have stayed at Regan after their medical problem has resolved, the suit alleges.

“As a result of the inappropriate detention of psychogeriatric patients on medical units, both psychiatric patients and medical patients residing in the same milieu are exposed to serious risk of physical harm,” the suit alleges.

As an example, Cosper’s suit mentions an incident last month in which one psychogeriatric patient assaulted another, causing one to break his hip. Neither had any reason to be in a medical unit, the suit states. Both were inadequately supervised “and more importantly, they were confined in a medical milieu that exposed both of them to a lower quality of care –– and therefore a higher degree of risk –– than would prevail in the psychiatric milieu at the Virks Building,” according to the suit.

Cosper is asking the court to order the state to: keep Virks open until it develops an appropriate alternative; resume admitting psychogeriatric patients to Virks; return to Virks psychogeriatric patients who are being held in medical units; and pay unspecified monetary damages “for each and every instance in which a patient was denied admission to the Virks Building … for long term psychogeriatric care.”

ffreyer@projo.com