All licensed nursing homes in California are licensed and certified by the California Department of Public Health, which conducts an annual inspection of every licensed skilled nursing facility in the state. In addition, the DPH is charged with the duty to investigate complaints of neglect or abuse, and issue the…
In their ongoing series on nursing oversight in the State of California, Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein of ProPublica are out with another story about California’s shortcomings in regulating healthcare professionals. Weber and Ornstein reveal that the national database that tracks dangerous or incompetent caregivers is missing serious disciplinary actions…
The New York Times is out with an article about lack of oversight given to the more than 400 long-term acute care hospitals that operate in the United States. These hospitals, most of which operate as for-profit organizations, are supposed to provide care for individuals that are too sick for…
The nursing home roommate from hell. A former San Diego nursing home resident was sentenced to 19 years in jail yesterday for setting a series of fires at two local nursing homes while she was a resident. According to an investigation, Mary Wilson tried to kill her nursing home roommate…
In 2007, Dr. David Graham, a drug safety expert with the FDA, testified before Congress and stated that approximately 15,000 people die each year in U.S. nursing homes from the off-label use of anti-psychotic drugs. Off-label use is the use of the drug for a condition it was not intended.…
A few times a year we hear news stories of Alzheimer’s sufferers wandering away from their homes and becoming lost. Those stories end one of two ways, and unfortunately, too often the ending is not a happy one. These sad stories have created a cottage industry for nursing home providers.…
USA Today has analyzed nursing home rankings under Medicare criteria and found that lowest scoring nursing homes tend to stay that way, year after year. Sadly, many of these poor performing nursing homes are the only nursing facilities for miles. According to this article, twenty percent of the country’s 15,700…
Nursing home abuse and neglect lawyers in California often lament the state’s weak enforcement of bad nursing homes. The California Department of Public Health, due primarily to inadequate funding, rarely provides the strong oversight of California’s 1,200 or so licensed skilled nursing facilities. As a result, bad nursing homes operate…
If you considering using the services of a residential care facility for the elderly or an assisted living facility, you may be wondering how to select a good one. Unfortunately, there is no rating system like you might find in hospitals, and now nursing homes, but there are actions you…
U.S. News and World Report, famous for its “best” lists, is out with a ranking of the country’s best nursing homes. There are approximately 16,000 individuals living in U.S. nursing homes, and approximately 3.2 million will spend time in one each year. Here at Walton Law Firm we get asked…