Southern California Nursing Home Abuse Lawyer Blog
With California making national news over elder abuse at nursing homes and residential care facilities for the elderly (RCFEs), it may not come as a surprise that the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health has reassigned Ernest Poolean, the “supervisor in charge of nursing home inspections,” only a few days following the “release of a highly critical audit of his division,” according to an article in Kaiser Health News.
Poolean’s reassignment suggests that the California Department of Public Health is beginning to look at nursing home neglect more closely and has decided to make elder abuse an important issue in Los Angeles and throughout the state. If your elderly loved one has suffered injuries as a result of nursing home abuse or neglect, it’s very important to contact an experienced San Diego nursing home abuse lawyer. At the Walton Law Firm, we are committed to helping older adults throughout Southern California.
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.”
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, 
It’s no secret that 
This news is only the latest in many reports concerning elderly dementia patients and the varied problems of antipsychotic drugs. Indeed, the California Department of Public Health and the Department of Health Care Services have been working to reduce the “off-label” use of 
Many states have been tightening their oversight of home care agencies over the past several years, due to a general sense of inadequacy in the services provided by these companies. And now, California has joined that group. According to an article in the New York Times, “California has become the latest state to tighten oversight of home agencies that provide custodial care—help with bathing, dressing, toileting and other basic tasks—to older adults and people with disabilities.”
