Articles Posted in Elder Care

August 27, 2014

Medicare Star Ratings and Quality of Care

Five-Star Nursing Homes May Not the Best Indicator of Care

Are Medicare star ratings good predictors for the quality of care at nursing homes? According to a recent article in the New York Times, a facility with a five-star rating may not be what one would expect. In fact, many five-star facilities have received fines for injuries related to nursing home neglect.

Rosewood Post-Acute Rehab, a nursing home located in a Sacramento suburb, received a five-star rating from Medicare. The nursing home “bears all the touches of a luxury hotel, including high ceilings, leather club chairs, and paintings of bucolic landscapes.” According to the article, getting a five-star rating—the highest possible—is not easy. Only about one-fifth of all nursing home in the U.S., about 3,000 total, hold this distinction.

August 20, 2014

Assisted Living Reforms Are Not Enough, Some Advocates Say

by Walton Law Firm

Many of us have heard about assisted living facility reforms pending before the California legislature, as well as those aimed specifically at residential care facilities for the elderly (RCFEs). But are those reforms sufficient to ensure that California seniors are safe from elder abuse? According to a recent story from KQED’s State of Health, many elder justice advocates in California do not believe the reforms are going to do enough.

Recent History of Elder Abuse in San Diego

According to Deborah Schoch, an advocate with the California HealthCare Foundation Center for Health Reporting, the number of assisting living facilities in our state essentially doubled over the last 25 years. For whom are these facilities designed? According to Schoch, they are intended for older, healthy adults who are “relatively independent.” Yet many of these facilities have taken in patients who require much more extensive levels of care, and assisted living facilities “are not designed to deliver skilled nursing care.”

August 11, 2014

California Needs a Tech Upgrade: Online Information and Assisting Living Facilities

by Walton Law Firm

It’s no secret that California assisted living facilities have been in the national news due to reports of nursing home abuse and neglect. Indeed, over the last year, elder rights advocates have emphasized the need to make information about nursing homes and assisted living facilities readily available to older adults and their loved ones. Without such information at our fingertips, how will we know which facilities are safe and can provide a high quality of care for our elderly parents? According to a recent story from KPBS San Diego Public Radio, this kind of information remains pretty difficult to access.

Lacking Internet Information About California Assisted Living Facilities

According to the recent KPBS story, it’s not easy to access information about the quality of nursing homes and assisted living facilities in Southern California. For example, Lorid Macri’s mother suffers from dementia, she told KPBS. At the beginning, Macri cared for her mother. However, the stress of caring for a dementia patient became “overwhelming.” And when Macri herself needed hospital care, she realized she needed to find an assisted living facility where her mother could receive quality care.

July 10, 2014

Getting Elder Care Benefits at Work

by Walton Law Firm

With more than two out of five Americans caring for their aging parents—many of whom do so because they cannot afford to pay for other elder assistance—it’s often difficult to find time for both work and caregiving. Indeed, according to a recent article in Forbes, many children who act as caregivers worry that, without assistance from their employers, their aging parents may face nursing home neglect. Lately, however, more employers are “now providing help for employees who feel that they just have to ‘suck it up’ in managing this care and their careers.”

What’s the relationship between elder abuse and workplace assistance? Many factors could play into this correlation, including:

When employees don’t have time to properly locate elder care resources, they make uninformed decisions about nursing homes, assisted-living facilities, or even in-home nurses. Help from an employer can mean the difference between a care facility with a strong patient record and one with a history of nursing home abuse violations.

June 18, 2014

Criminal Record Disclosure and Effects on California Nursing Home Services

by Walton Law Firm

A recent article in Reuters reported that the mayor of Los Angeles has declared his support for “a new state law barring public agencies from refusing job applications from people convicted of a crime.” But could such a law place residents in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities at greater risk of nursing home abuse and neglect?

No Outright Criminal Background Checks for Employees?

The California law isn’t intended to put California residents at risk, but rather to encourage social rehabilitation. According to Reuters, Garcetti’s support of the law comes with a deep concern “that millions of people who have been to prison, particularly from minority communities, have little prospect of landing a job once they admit to a conviction.” The law isn’t just for nursing homes or other care facilities for older adults. Rather, it’s part of a larger movement to make criminal background checks less of a priority at the start of an interviewing process at many public agencies across the state of California.

May 5, 2014

Elder Care and Technology

by Walton Law Firm

We live in an age of technology, yet the elder care industry doesn’t seem to have taken notice. According to a recent article in Forbes, the internet and other digital tools may be able to improve the quality of elder care, and to attend to matters of elder abuse and neglect across the country. We mentioned a recent story about elder financial abuse and online mapping. This is only one of the tools that may help our older loved ones in the years to come.

Taking care of our elderly loved ones will be especially important in the coming years as the large number of Americans who make up the baby boomer generation grow old and require care in assisted living facilities and nursing homes. While none of us likes to believe that nursing home neglect is a problem that can affect our loved ones, recent news stories throughout California suggest that elder abuse is a problem that afflicts many people. As a result, it’s important to contact a nursing home abuse attorney if you suspect that your elderly loved one has been the victim of nursing home neglect.

High Costs of Elder Care

April 4, 2014

Nursing Home Inspectors “Rushed” Investigations in Los Angeles County

by Walton Law Firm

As many California residents know, our state has made national news over the last year for concerns about nursing home negligence and nursing home abuse. A recent article in the Sacramento Bee reported that Los Angeles County public health officials, “in an effort to reduce California’s backlog of health and safety complaints at nursing homes,” might have urged inspectors “to close cases without fully investigating them.” Internal memos sent between managers, inspectors, and supervisors from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health suggest that these quick and potentially harmful case closures are part of an effort called the “Complaint Workload Clean Up Project,” and it has been in effect “since at least the summer of 2012.”

What does this mean for elderly nursing home residents? In short, complaints at nursing homes and nursing facilities in Los Angeles County might not have been adequately investigated, and county supervisors could be held liable for injuries that occurred. Do you have a loved one who resides at a nursing facility in Southern California? At the Walton Law Firm, our California nursing home abuse attorneys have years of experience handling elder law claims and can speak with you today.

Nursing Home Residents at Risk of Inattention in Southern California

January 13, 2014

The New Financial Side of Hospice Care

by Walton Law Firm

Profiting from Bad Hospice Ethics

Last week, we discussed a recent phenomenon in the hospice care industry that’s quickly becoming an elder abuse concern. Specifically, hospice—a form of care designed to allow “patients to die at home or in other familiar surroundings,” according to an article in the Washington Post—has turned into a financially lucrative business. But is it an ethical one? Are hospice companies acting outside the boundaries of the law? And is it possible to take legal action against hospice chains that recruit patients who aren’t suffering from a terminal illness?

Old%20Dying%20Woman.jpg First, it’s important to have a clear idea about why hospices are bringing in relatively healthy older adults, and how these companies are profiting from non-terminal patients. How did this start to happen? In short, many hospice care centers have begun recruiting patients with aggressive marketing tactics, and many of those patients aren’t terminal. It’s in the financial interest of a hospice chain to “find patients well before death,” the Washington Post reported. And the reason is simple: “Medicare pays a hospice about $150 a day per patient for routine care, regardless of whether the company sends a nurse or any other worker out that day. That means healthier patients, who generally need less help and live longer, yield more profits.”

January 6, 2014

Overuse and Misuse of Hospice Care

by Walton Law Firm

Have you been urged to place your elderly parent in hospice care despite the fact that he or she is not terminally ill? Hospice care is intended for patients who are terminally ill and for whom there is no cure. So why are healthy older adults ending up in hospice? A recent article in the Washington Post revealed that this phenomenon might be a larger problem than we’d like to think. Indeed, over the 2000s, the newspaper reported that the “number of ‘hospice survivors’ in the United States has risen dramatically.” What’s going on? According to the article, “hospice companies earn more by recruiting patients who aren’t actually dying,” since “healthier patients are more profitable because they require fewer visits and stay enrolled longer.”

If you have been pressured to move a parent into hospice care, your elderly loved one might not receive the kind of treatment she or he needs. For-profit companies shouldn’t be allowed to take advantage of older adults. Indeed, we might think of these actions as another form of elder abuse. It’s important to speak to an experienced elder law attorney about your options.

Hospice Discharge Statistics

December 23, 2013

Castro Valley Nursing Home Residents Abandoned

by Walton Law Firm

About a month ago, the New York Daily News reported that fourteen nursing home residents at Valley Manor Community Care Home, also called Valley Springs Manor, were abandoned in “filthy and unsafe” conditions. According to the article, some of the residents at this Castro Valley, California facility were bedridden, while others were ill and simply required significant care. Reporters from NBC Bay Area referred to the situation as a “botched closure,” as the California Department of Social Services had closed the nursing facility days before but hadn’t accounted for the safety of these residents. At the time, these social services officials closed nursing home “because of deplorable conditions.”

When we think about transitioning an elderly loved one into a nursing home or an assisted-living facility, we expect that the facility will provide care and won’t engage in acts of nursing home abuse or neglect. However, nursing home abuse occurs more often than we’d like to think. If you’re concerned about a loved one’s safety or care, a California elder justice advocate can discuss your case with you today.

Details of the Nursing Home Shut Down and Resident Abandonment

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