Articles Posted in Nursing Home Abuse and Neglect

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At the end of last week, a Medicare rate adjustment that cuts $16 billion in nursing home funding went into effect. That cut, combined with state cuts, is creating conditions that are likely to put nursing homes in a state of crisis. In fact, the president of the American Health Care Association is predicting the nursing facilities will close their doors.

Already numerous nursing homes have closed their doors because of money problems, and many others have reduced staffing, creating conditions for substandard care. The crisis could not come a worse time, as baby boomers steamroll toward retirement and the need for skilled nursing care. Just last year U.S. nursing homes housed 1.85 million people, about 100,000 more than the previous year.

In Griswold, Conn., the community’s only nursing home shut down earlier this year because of rising costs and an inability to pay for $4.9 million in needed renovations for the 90-bed facility.”A 92-year-old woman was screaming and crying as she was loaded into the ambulance, saying ‘This is my home,'” Griswold First Selectman Philip Anthony said. His 88-year-old mother was a resident of the same home at the time.

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California should take heed. Illinois has been housing mentally ill felons with the elderly in state nursing homes and the results have not been pretty. An elderly woman was raped by an ex-convict, a frail man had his throat slashed, and in one home a wheelchair-bound man died of massive head injuries that a doctor said it looked like he was hit with a baseball bat.

According to one report, mentally ill patients make up over 15% of Illinois’ nursing home patient population, and among them are approximately 3,000 ex-felons with histories of serious crimes. Nursing home owners downplay that numbers of violent attacks, arguing they are miniscule in context to the whole, but there is a growing concern. The states largest nursing home owner’s association has advocated an end to the practice, asking state officials to create separate facilities for those residents who may pose a danger to others.

While the population of U.S. residents is aging, those who can afford to do so are opting from home health or assisted living care over traditional nursing home or convalescent hospitals.

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A report being released today by the Government Accountability Office finds that the federal program designed to identify and scrutinize the country’s worse nursing homes is missing many of the poor performers. The Centers for Medical and Medicaid Services has identified about 136 nursing homes nationwide that are considered “special focus facilities” for their history of problems related to patient care, but many more questionable facilities are not making the list.

Herb Kohl, the chairman of the Senate Aging Committee wants more information about all of the poorest performing facilities on the government website Nursing Home Compare. The current report does not identify the homes.

“If far more than 136 nursing homes boast the bleakest conditions, then perhaps we should consider expanding” the program, said Kohl.

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After 15 years of bouncing from nursing home to nursing home, and living with the indignities, the mother of a quadriplegic and brain injured daughter had had enough. On Sunday, September 13, Diana Harden wrote a note to a television news station exposing the problems she encountered trying to care for her daughter, then went to the nursing and shot her daughter to death, before turning the gun on herself.

In her letter to ABC news in the San Francisco Bay area, Harden spoke of the years of abuse and neglect her daughter endured in her nursing home. Yvette Harden, suffered a major brain injury and quadriplegia in a car accident 15 years earlier, and spent the last six years at the Oakland Springs Care Center. Oakland Springs is a nursing facility that had 54 complaints lodged against it in 2008 (which is an astonishing amount), and hundreds of deficiencies.

The letter attempts to explain, “the deaths of my daughter and myself.” In it, Harden says that that nurses called her daughter a “big fat pig,” and that they would “wash her like a car” in the shower. To punish the daughter, Harden claims, the water would be turned cold until she screamed. As a result, Harden wrote that her daughter has been “begging” her to end her life for over two years. The stress was too much.

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There is a growing movement to ban the common practice of requiring nursing home residents to waive their right to file a lawsuit in claims of negligence, abuse, or neglect in favor of arbitration. Last week, several consumer advocates testified before congress and criticized the practice of “forced arbitration.”

Public Citizen released a report alleging that the practice of forced arbitration, essentially requiring a consumer to sign an arbitration agreement as a condition of being provided the service, has become pervasive. The report, “Forced Arbitration: Unfair and Everywhere” found that many industries, including nursing homes, banks, contractors, cable companies and auto sales, will require consumes to waive their right to file a lawsuit before the services will be provided.

For years, attorneys and consumer advocates have questioned the impartiality of arbitration, which usually has a lawyer or retired judge, or a panel of them, sitting as the trier of fact. The Public Citizen report reveals that arbitrators for the National Arbitration Forum (NAF), the largest arbitration firm in the country (but one of many), ruled against consumers 94 percent of the time.

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We write enough here about nursing homes that commit acts of abuse or neglect, so we thought we’d mention one that is being recognized for providing good care. A California Filipino-American owned nursing facility received a five-star rating from the US Department of Health and Human Services and the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Good Samaritan Rehabilitation and Care Center, in Stockton, was one of only a handful of nursing homes in the country to receive 5-stars in every measurement of quality of care. The Medicare Nursing Home Compare website provides categorical quality ratings for each of the 16,000 U.S. nursing homes. Good Samaritan received five starts in the areas of health inspections, quality measures, and staffing levels.

The owner of Good Samaritan said that the facility takes the ratings seriously, and continually looking for ways to improve care.

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The administrator of Kern Valley Hospital was charged eight counts of felony elder abuse this week after permitting caregivers to forcibly administer psychotropic drugs to residents out of convenience and not medical necessity. One resident died because of the practice.

Since 2006 the director of nursing at Lake Isabella nursing home has allegedly ordered caregivers to administer high doses of psychotropic medications to Alzheimer’s and dementia patients to control their behavior and make them easier to care for. This use of medications as a “chemical restraint” is illegal, and will likely expose the nursing home to civil lawsuits in addition to the criminal charges that have been filed.

According to news reports, three residents may have died as a result of the practice. The residents who died were Mae Brinkley, 91, Joseph Shepter, 76, and Alexander Zaiko, 85.

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It’s not uncommon to hear nursing home residents to complain about the quality of the food being served. The Nevada state health officials decided to do something about it.

A routine survey last Tuesday by the health department of a North Las Vegas nursing home found some very serious food safety violations. Upon inspection, officials found a 16-foot hole in the ceiling of the kitchen that was leaking, it found perishable foods like chicken and beef being stored at unsafe temperatures, soiled and contaminated countertops, and an “overall inability of the staff to safely prepare food.”

So what did the health department do? It didn’t force the 240-bed facility to close down. Instead, it suspended the food permits, and required the nursing home to order food from local restaurants. The suspension only lasted for a day. The problems were addressed and the food permit reinstated.

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A Tracy, California nursing home received a $100,000 fine and a AA citation, the state’s most severe, after it was determined that the death of a 78-year-old resident was due to nursing home malpractice. The nursing home staff failed to monitor the woman’s medication and failed to send her to the hospital when her brain started to bleed.

According to the report, the resident had recently received an increase in medication to prevent clots. With the medication came a potential for internal bleeding. Shortly after increase in dosage, the woman began to slur her words and complained of a headache. She kept saying, “My head, my head…” But nothing was done.

Several hours later the resident was semi-conscious, waking only to vomit. The family complained to the home that something was not right, but failed to take the matter seriously. The woman was eventually transferred to the acute-care hospital, but it was too late. She died in the emergency room.

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Los Angeles – The death of an 88-year-old nursing home resident has resulted in an AA citation and a $100,000 fine, the most severe penalty that can be imposed by California regulators. The California Department of Public Health issued the penalty after it concluded that nursing home resident’s death was the result of neglect.

According to reports, the resident had received a gastrostomy tube (or g-tube) for feedings on August 29, 2008 and was admitted to Arbor View nursing home on September 3, 2008. The feeding tube became dislodged approximately one week later, and a nurse attempted to reinsert it. Unfortunately, the nurse missed the stomach, and instead inserted the tube into the abdominal cavity. Feedings were then continued.

The next day, the resident was rushed to the hospital with nausea and vomiting, and a scan revealed the problem. She had massive amounts of feeding material in her abdominal cavity that doctors tried to remove. The elderly resident contracted an infection and died shortly there after.

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