Articles Posted in Nursing Home Abuse/Neglect

Nursing home abuse and negligence has become one of the most serious forms of personal injury plaguing our senior population in the United States today. Here is a list of nursing home abuse-related stories that were in the news lately:

AA Citation: Pacific Coast Manor, a nursing home in Santa Cruz, was fined $100,000 after a state investigation concluded that inadequate care led to the death of a 71-year-old woman, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported. The nursing home reportedly failed to monitor the woman’s narcotic medications, which led to her death. The facility received the AA citation, the most severe penalty for a nursing home violation.

Resident dropped: Sky Harbor Care Center in Yucca Valley is also facing a $100,000 fine after state investigators determined that a female resident died from complications as a result of being dropped on her knees by a nursing home employee, according to the Riverside Press Enterprise. This was the second big fine in one week for this nursing home. The other one had to do with a 91-year-old woman, who had been dropped on her head by another employee.

Accident: Only weeks after its license was fully restored, a Pennsylvania nursing home was slapped with another $3,000 fine after a female resident was dropped while being lifted by a mechanical device. Laurel Cresh had been on provisional license for nearly 24 deficiencies found during an inspection in March.

Fighting back: A Tennessee nursing home is fighting a state fine and ban from accepting new patients. The state’s health department had found numerous violations during investigations at the Hermitage nursing home in October and November.
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A Napa family is suing a local nursing home alleging that caregivers did not follow the care plan specified for the resident, which resulted in her death. According to an article in the Napa Valley Register, Eulalia Grimoldi died within a couple of months of being admitted to the Napa Nursing Center because of acute dehydration. Family members, who filed the wrongful death lawsuit, say they had specifically told the nursing home to “encourage Grimoldi to drink fluids.”

Grimoldi had been diagnosed with dementia when she was admitted into the nursing home in May 2006. In less than a month, nursing home staff had her admitted to a local hospital because they saw she had a “decreased level of consciousness.” However, hospital staff noted in their records that Grimoldi suffered from acute dehydration.

What is interesting is that the nursing home was fined $15,000 by the Department of Public Health “for failing to follow a care plan that called for staff to encourage Grimoldi to drink fluids.” According to the documents cited by the newspaper, health department officials had noted that this violation by the nursing home staff “presented imminent danger that death or serious harm would (or could) result.”
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State officials have imposed a $100,000 fine on a Fontana nursing home in connection with the death of a resident in March, the Riverside Press Enterprise reports. As it turns out, it is the second death for which Citrus Nursing Center has been blamed for in the last three years, the newspaper article says.

The nursing home was cited most recently in October for not taking care of a 91-year-old woman who was dropped on her head. A staff member reportedly did not follow proper procedure while moving the woman from a wheelchair to a bed, according to California Department of Public Health records. The woman died nine days after taking the fall. Interestingly enough, this incident happened Feb. 24, only two weeks after the staff member was trained on how to use the portable lift she attempted to use to transfer the resident in question.

The citation given to Citrus is termed an “AA” citation – which means, it is the most severe penalty that can be issued by law. The nursing home is yet to pay the fine, officials told the newspaper. And apparently, this is not the company’s first violation. Previously, they’ve been cited for failing to contact a doctor about a patient’s worsening condition from a deadly bacterial infection. In another instance, they did not contact the doctor of a diabetic patient, whose blood sugar levels were unsafe.
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Five lawsuits filed against the Encino-Tarzana Regional Medical Center accuse the hospital of knowing that one of the male nursing assistant molested and even sexually assaulted patients at the facility and doing absolutely nothing about it. According to a news report in the Los Angeles Daily News, the complaints filed against the hospital allege that hospital officials knew about the nurse’s despicable conduct toward several female patients before he was suspended in April 2006.

The lawsuits also allege that the hospital did not do enough background checks on Ramon Eduardo Rodas Gaspar, who is now on the run and wanted by police on suspicion of molesting more than 10 women who were sedated after surgery, the newspaper reported. Plaintiffs’ attorneys say the most appalling aspect of the lawsuit is that the hospital did nothing to protect patients even after officials knew what Gaspar was up to.

An attorney for the hospital of course denies that allegation. According to hospital officials, there was only one complaint against Gaspar before 2006 and that was largely unsubstantiated in an internal investigation. But among the complainants is also a female nurse who said Gaspar groped and sexually harassed her soon after he was hired in 2004. She reported it to the hospital, but nothing came out of it.
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Life Care Centers of America, a nursing home chain based in Tennessee that operates 13 nursing homes here in California, was recently indicted by a Middlesex, Mass. grand jury on charges of manslaughter, abuse and neglect of a long-term facility resident. According to the Boston Globe, this is the first time in Massachusetts that a national corporation has faced criminal manslaughter charges, said Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley.

The charges stemmed from the death of Julia McCauley, a patient at the home who was prone to wandering the facility in her wheelchair. So her worried doctors had McCauley fitted with a tan plastic bracelet, called WanderGuard, that would set off an alarm and lock the doors if she wandered too close to the exits. So, how is it that McCauley was found in her overturned wheelchair dead at the bottom of the nursing home’s front stairs with a 3-inch gash in her forehead?

And where was the Wanderguard bracelet mandated by her doctor? McCauley’s WanderGuard was nowhere to be found! Her doctor’s orders required that the WanderGuard be checked once a day to ensure that it was on the patient and fully operating, but strangely those orders were not ever entered into her chart and she had not been wearing the bracelet for 2 ½ months prior to the fall that led to her death.
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By: A Staff Writer
An Illinois family is suing Manor Care for the nursing home death of an elderly resident who was at the nursing home for rehabilitation after she fractured her hip and was diagnosed with dementia. According to a news report in the Southwest News-Herald, the suit seeks $200,000 in damages and attorney’s fees.

The lawsuit alleges that the nursing home completely neglected to take care of 75-year-old Helen Edwards’ physical needs including cleaning and dressing her bed sores and infections. The complaint also says Edwards suffered “unrelieved pain associated with both her hip fracture and wounds.”

According to the report when Edwards’ daughter came to visit her at the nursing home, Edwards complained of severe discomfort. When her daughter took her mother to the hospital to see what was wrong, doctors told her Edwards suffered from pneumonia, dehydration, severe malnutrition and infection. Edwards had lost 13 pounds during her stay at the nursing home. She died shortly afterward from severe infection that could not be cured, the article stated.
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By: Carol J. Gibbons, J.D.

They take the profits and duck liability.

We have all have heard it said, “Follow the Money”, but according to the New York Times, poor Vivian Hewitt is finding it a hard row to hoe after her mom died because of the negligence of Habana Health Care Center in Tampa, Florida.

Vivian’s mom developed Alzheimer’s disease and Vivian placed her mom in the care of Habana Health Care. But, little did Vivian know that Habana switched hands and was under the new ownership of a prominent investment firm – Warburg Pincus. Investors are in business to make profits, and it seems that there is a growing trend – private equity investors buy up nursing homes, cutting staff and shielding themselves from liability by spreading out the ownership in an ever-growing corporate web, the Times described as a ‘rat’s maze’.

What a concept! Assets and shares of ownership are purposely obscured and difficult to determine – discouraging lawsuits that are costly and almost impossible for grieving families to endure. It is hard to believe that a business model that was created for such a positive purpose could be bastardized in a way that works to protect a corporate structure that sanctions the worst forms of neglect! Neglect of our own parents and grandparents!
http://www.sptimes.com/2007/09/28/Opinion/As_profits_grow__so_d.shtml Continue reading →

By: Carol J. Cardwell-Gibbons, J.D
Arlene Renteria was only 38 when she died, and Arelene’s family is devastated and angry! For years, from June 16, 2000 until March 2, 2003 Arlene lived, if you could call it that, at California-based Covina Rehabilitation Center (Covina). Poor Arlene suffered from a degenerative brain disorder that left her totally helpless, and at risk for bed sores, because she could not control her body’s movements. Arlene’s condition left her completely vulnerable and at the mercy of Covina’s employees and what Arlene’s family asserted was ‘inadequate staffing’ and failure to follow Arlene’s plan of care.

According to the California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform[page 5], the court found that the employees of Covina did not follow Arlene’s plan of care, which called for daily checks of her skin for possible abrasions and bed sores. Arlene’s plan clearly called for a doctor to be notified if bed sores were present. But, it was only after Arlene was hospitalized for a severe bout of diarrhea that a doctor discovered her open wounds! Unfortunately, it was too late for Arlene as vast amounts of bacteria had already done their damage causing Arlene’s death.
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If you thought certain nursing homes were despicable for mistreating and neglecting the elderly, this story will make your skin crawl. According to an article in the Philadelphia Daily News, a Delaware-based company called Homeward Bound is in big trouble (as they should be) for defrauding seniors into paying money for an insurance product, which promised high quality home-based care. Thousands of seniors from different states including California, New York, Florida and Pennsylvania signed up for the service and paid thousands of dollars, but later found out they had been duped.

They got no such service and the home care provider they had been assigned to said Homeward Bound did not pay them to deliver the services. The attorney generals of New York, Pennsylvania and Florida are taking legal action against this business, which had no problems preying on the worst fears of vulnerable citizens on fixed income, that they would be subjected to living in a nursing home rather than in their own homes. To give them the hope that they wouldn’t have to check into a nursing home but apparently knowing that they would never live up to the promises they were making – cold and despicable!
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Many of us fall into the ‘sandwich’ generation, so named because while many of us are still raising our children we are also finding ourselves responsible for the care of our parents as well. According to a CBS news story, over 16 million Americans find themselves sandwiched between children and parents, and when family members can no longer care for a loved one at home a nursing home may become necessary. In 25 years it is projected that there will be 60 million Americans between the ages of 66-84 – many needing part or full time nursing home care. The only thing worse than the feelings of guilt at not being able to care for a sick, aging parent is the guilt of placing them in a nursing home and then finding out they are being abused in that home. Unfortunately, nursing home abuse happens way too often! So, do your homework!

But how does one find a good nursing home? How does one know if a nursing home has had violations and/or fines levied against them? There is so much to learn and fortunately as the need for such homes has continued to rise, so has the information that is available. Many organizations and government agencies are there to help you in your search for an appropriate nursing home. For example, Medicare provides a helpful checklist to use as you call each nursing home center.

Another organization, called Member of the Family provides a list of over 16,000 Medicare and Medicaid ‘certified’ nursing homes-listed by state.