A new executive director for Healthcare Services has taken the reins at the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center, and she’ll be taking on huge budget overages when it comes to inmate health care. Using traveling nurses to cover inmates’ needs is costing the jail millions of dollars.
Adrienne Bachtel started work on July 8th. At her first meeting of the MDC Healthcare Authority on July 16, officials spent more than half the meeting discussing the cost of paying for the nurses.
The quarterly budget for traveling nurses is $125,000, but in each of the last three quarters, MDC has been spending anywhere from 2.1 to 2.7 million dollars, officials said, which is 16 to 21 times the projected budget…