Editor’s note: This article contains references to sexual assault and harassment.
The CEO of St. Peter’s Health, the longtime hospital in Helena, on Wednesday described recent sexual abuse reports against two former staff members at the hospital as “deeply troubling” and pledged that, after a federal inspection, the facility has changed how it documents sexual misconduct complaints.
Montana Free Press on Monday reported on the existence and outcomes of the federal inspection, a publicly available document completed more than a year ago that St. Peter’s, a nonprofit that employs more than 1,700 people, had not previously acknowledged.
The 26-page survey by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services described more than a dozen instances in 2023 and 2024 when staff members had not formally documented or properly investigated sexual abuse complaints against two nurses, leading the federal agency to place the hospital in “immediate jeopardy” status in January 2025, until it approved St. Peter’s plan for corrective changes a week later.
One account detailed in the report about the actions of a former employee matches the criminal complaint and licensing inspection against Aaron Gams, a nurse who was fired by the hospital in October 2024 for assaulting an ICU patient and later inappropriately accessing her medical records. Gams has pleaded not guilty to the felony charge against him and is scheduled to appear in court later this month.
In his first public remarks about the report in his Wednesday interview with Montana Public Radio, CEO Wade Johnson, who has led the local hospital since 2017, acknowledged that St. Peter’s had previously kept information about sexual abuse allegations in many uncoordinated locations, rather than the hospital’s centralized reporting system.
“[O]ur staff members will keep notes as they’re working through things,” Johnson said. “There may be email communications between staff members or between leaders to address this. We had an additional system that works within our compliance space. So, we have a couple of different locations, and that was honestly — again, that was part of the problem that we have to own as an organization, and did own and did correct. And that is, we need a single source of where this information goes, in a timely fashion.”
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Inside the ‘systemic’ sexual abuse reporting failure at a Helena hospital
A 2025 federal investigation that has not previously been reported found that a dozen staffers at St. Peter’s in Helena had failed, on more than a dozen occasions, to file required reports about hospital employees allegedly sexually harassing and abusing patients.
Montana Public Radio reached out to St. Peter’s for comment after featuring MTFP’s original reporting in its broadcast. In response, Montana Public Radio noted, the hospital asked the station to interview the CEO about the 2025 inspection. When contacted by MTFP about the findings of the federal inquiry in late January, a hospital spokesperson had declined to make Johnson or other administrators available for an interview for almost two weeks.
Asked by Montana Public Radio why the hospital had declined interview requests from MTFP, Johnson attributed the decision to an issue of “timing” and the need to address outstanding, and unspecified, litigation details.
“Fortunately, now we’re in a position to be able to have that conversation with you and others as we move forward,” Johnson told the radio station.
Among the alleged assault instances highlighted in the federal report, inspectors flagged an April 2024 complaint against “staff member A,” the individual whose timeline and incident details align with Gams, made by a 51-year-old oncology patient. Inspectors said that, after the patient and her family informed other staff members that a male nurse had inappropriately touched her breasts, at least four hospital employees failed to document the report in an official complaint.
Higher-up officials at the facility were not notified about the April complaint until roughly nine months later, the report said, days after MTFP reported Gams’ arrest.
In his public radio interview, Johnson pushed back against the report’s depiction of that event for the first time. Without specifying dates or details about the hospital’s response, Johnson said that the patient who originally made that complaint later “withdrew” the allegation, leaving the hospital with no complaint to investigate.
“Our policy respected patient choice, and we would not pursue an investigation further without a patient’s consent in the matter,” Johnson said.
The 2025 investigation did not state that the oncology patient, who died later that year, had withdrawn her original grievance. Federal hospital inspections about patient safety standards and protocols typically do not assess the merits of a specific allegation. Rather, inspections evaluate how a hospital’s actions align with or depart from its internal protocols and federal regulations intended to prevent patient neglect and abuse.
In the case of the oncology patient, federal regulators flagged St. Peter’s lack of formal documentation and investigation as evidence that the hospital was not sufficiently protecting patient rights.
Pressed by the public radio interviewer about whether the hospital had taken any action at the time to investigate the employee or suspend them while the incident was reviewed, Johnson said no.
“The patient withdrew their concern relative to the interaction that they had had with a staff member. So at that time, there was no further investigation that was done relative to employees in that area,” Johnson said.
According to the federal report, the employee identified in the April complaint was fired roughly six months later, after another patient accused him of assaulting her in the ICU in 2023. Johnson said that, when that report came to light, the hospital removed the staff member from patient care and placed him on administrative leave.
In another circumstance outlined by federal inspectors, a male patient on the Behavioral Health Unit made a written sexual assault and harassment allegation against a female nurse. Within days of the patient delivering his written grievance, at least five staff members read or learned about his allegations against the female nurse, federal investigators found, but none documented the patient’s complaint in an official incident report. Despite that documentation gap, the hospital said it investigated the complaint, removed the traveling nurse from patient care and ultimately terminated her contract.
Johnson reiterated that federal regulators had quickly approved the hospital’s plan of correction soon after placing it on “immediate jeopardy” status. He stressed that the hospital remains in compliance with its internal policies and federal regulations.
“I think it is important to note that when we find something, we fix something,” Johnson said. “…The actions of a couple of individuals do not reflect the actions of 1,800 people who come here every day to take care of people and do it with the highest level of standards and ethics.”
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