Traveling nurses drive MDC health care way over budget
By Daniel Montaño
August 1, 2025 at 6:44 PM MDT
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.
Rodney McNease is executive director of governmental affairs at University of New Mexico Hospital, which administers MDC's health care. He said they’ve been working on finding different strategies to reduce costs, including hiring more staff nurses, and using different kinds of workers, like licensed practical nurses instead of registered nurses, which are more expensive. .
“We're working a lot on recruitment, and we have made some conversions, but it's just really, really hard to do that,” he said. “One of the things we're really looking at is, could we rebalance that using lower paid staff, like adding more LPNs, which in a lot of corrections work, LPNs do a fair amount of the kind of work that we're doing out there.”
Associate Chief Medical Officer for Correctional Health Care at UNMH Dr. Rebbeca Fastle said another option would be to tap emergency medical technicians (EMTs) to fill some of the roles currently handled by traveling nurses. She said it’s important to find a solution to staffing issues because they anticipate an influx of inmates with medical and behavioral health needs in the coming months.
“Law enforcement agencies are going to be doing a tactical sweep on Central [Avenue] from now until the middle of September. And we anticipate, and they've warned us, about a huge influx of that census from that,” she said. “And we know that a lot of those patients will have serious mental health disorders and opioid use disorder.”
During the meeting officials cited the average daily population for May and June of this year at more than 1,850 inmates, with more than 750 of those requiring mental health services.
Because of the McClendon Settlement, the population cap for MDC is 1,950 inmates, before people have to start being placed on the community custody program, be transferred to another facility, or have the courts work out another option.
Support for this coverage comes from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
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.
Rodney McNease is executive director of governmental affairs at University of New Mexico Hospital, which administers MDC's health care. He said they’ve been working on finding different strategies to reduce costs, including hiring more staff nurses, and using different kinds of workers, like licensed practical nurses instead of registered nurses, which are more expensive. .
“We're working a lot on recruitment, and we have made some conversions, but it's just really, really hard to do that,” he said. “One of the things we're really looking at is, could we rebalance that using lower paid staff, like adding more LPNs, which in a lot of corrections work, LPNs do a fair amount of the kind of work that we're doing out there.”
Associate Chief Medical Officer for Correctional Health Care at UNMH Dr. Rebbeca Fastle said another option would be to tap emergency medical technicians (EMTs) to fill some of the roles currently handled by traveling nurses. She said it’s important to find a solution to staffing issues because they anticipate an influx of inmates with medical and behavioral health needs in the coming months.
“Law enforcement agencies are going to be doing a tactical sweep on Central [Avenue] from now until the middle of September. And we anticipate, and they've warned us, about a huge influx of that census from that,” she said. “And we know that a lot of those patients will have serious mental health disorders and opioid use disorder.”
During the meeting officials cited the average daily population for May and June of this year at more than 1,850 inmates, with more than 750 of those requiring mental health services.
Because of the McClendon Settlement, the population cap for MDC is 1,950 inmates, before people have to start being placed on the community custody program, be transferred to another facility, or have the courts work out another option.
Support for this coverage comes from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.