Three Hawaii State Hospital employees have filed a class action lawsuit claiming supervisors created an unsafe environment that fostered daily attacks by patients on frontline workers.

The lawsuit, filed in Circuit Court on Friday, said the supervisors knew steps to make the facility safer but opted not to do so to look good on paper and maintain their positions and control over the hospital.

Attorney Michael Green, who is representing the employees, said the lawsuit will represent about 300 people — those who have been assaulted while working at the hospital from January 2006 to Friday.

"There’s multiple beatings every day," Green said. "We have people who are highly educated who will never work again. They have brain injuries. They’re on workers’ comp. They’re on more medication than the patients."

According to the lawsuit, management could have made improvements by hiring additional and physically capable staff, maintaining safety equipment and emphasizing staff safety. Instead, management hired incapable people based on favoritism and discouraged staff from reporting incidents and filing workers’ compensation claims, the lawsuit said.

Management also downgraded patient assessment levels — a factor that determines how much staffing is required — to create the impression that the facility was safe and adequately staffed, the suit said.

While the hospital is the state’s only public mental health facility, most of the admissions are inmates from the state prison system, referred to the hospital for mental evaluations, the lawsuit said. But the hospital has no law enforcement personnel on staff, and a state agency cited the hospital in April for inadequate training for encounters with assaultive patients.

The plaintiffs are Joshua Akeo, a psychiatric nurse, and Kalford Keanu Jr. and Ryan Oyama, both psychiatric technicians. All three can’t work because of injuries from attacks that allegedly happened because of understaffing.

The defendants include William Elliot, former acting administratorwho acknowledged at a Senate hearing that he lacked the required credentials for the position, and Emma Wilson Evans, associate chief of nursing, who has six family members working at the hospital, including her daughter and two sisters, the suit said. Elliot retired in August.

Other defendants are nurse manager Candace Sullivan, whom a state legislator accused of lying under oath during a hearing on mismanagement last week, and nurse manager Robert Burns. The suit alleges Burns was promoted after beginning a relationship with the director of nursing, Leona Guest, who also is named as a defendant and is the mother of three workers at the hospital.

The Department of Health referred questions about the lawsuit to the attorney general’s office, which did not immediately return a call for comment.