By John Loftus

Times Staff Writer

There's a new boss at Friends Hospital, and "new" has been the key word since late August, when Kenneth Glass took over the top job at the venerable psychiatric hospital on Roosevelt Boulevard at Adams Avenue.

New policies, new concentrations, new people.

Patient safety is one of those concentrations, Glass said during an interview last week in an office in Friends' Scattergood Building.

"Safety always needs to be a concern," he said. "In any institution in which people spend the night, safety is a concern.

"Everyone at Friends understands the importance of safety," Glass said. "I visit every unit personally to talk about safety."

Staffers study videos taken in the hospital to get ideas of how to improve the monitoring of patients, he said.

Protecting the hospital's charges had been a problem in the past year, according to published reports.

In June, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Business Journal printed stories about a patient suicide at Friends in April, and the Inquirer also reported police records show allegations that three patients, including a 13-year-old girl, had been raped at the hospital.

Dissatisfied with the hospital's patient oversight after the suicide, Delaware County officials stopped referring patients to Friends' crisis-response center, which could be called a psychiatric emergency room. Philadelphia health officials stopped referring emergency cases to Friends in July.

Subsequently, Psychiatric Solutions Inc., which acquired a majority ownership of Friends in 2007, replaced the hospital's CEO, Arris Veronie, as well as several other top staff members.

The for-profit company then tapped Glass, a native Philadelphian, as CEO after a national search.

Glass, who has a doctoral degree in clinical psychology from Columbia University and a finance certificate from the Harvard Business School, took over at Friends on Aug. 26.

He administers a Quaker-founded mental-health hospital that is almost 200 years old and has a $45 million annual budget. There are almost 400 employees seeing to the care of a patient population that fluctuates between 170 and 190.

Some of those staffers are new to their jobs, having replaced workers who were shown the door.

How many? Glass said he couldn't give an exact figure, but characterized the number as "a lot."

"The work we do is a calling," Glass said. "It requires passion and vigilance."

It takes more than training and skill, he added.

"To work here, you need a special sensitivity," Glass said. "It's skill and will."

That resolve, he said, has resulted in the need to tell some employees, "Friends is not the place for you."

In one department, he said, there are seven new staffers, who replaced five who were let go.

There also is a new concentration on asking patients to direct their own treatments. This "recovery approach" is new to the field of behavioral health, which itself is an umbrella term that covers mental health and addiction services, Glass said.

"People are experts in their own lives," he said.

They can be shown how to make the changes they need, Glass added.

One of the other challenges Glass faces is money.

At Friends, the number of patients without insurance has doubled. Besides that, the new leader said, costs have been climbing 8 percent per year while reimbursements have been flat or close to flat.

Glass said times aren't tough just for Friends. They're bad for everyone, he reasoned, and not always in an economic sense.

"People's lives have become more distressed in the past ten years," he said.

With that in mind, Glass said, Friends is a resource for the community. Much of his effort thus far has been devoted to reassuring people that the hospital is there to help.

Reporter John Loftus can be reached at 215-354-3110 or jloftus@phillynews.com