Articles Posted in Nursing Home Abuse and Neglect

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A Sacramento jury slammed an area nursing home with a $28 million verdict last week after it found the home liable for elder abuse and neglect. Before deliberations, attorney Ed Dudensing told the jury to, “make them feel it.” It did. The nursing home, as expected, will appeal.

What is believed to be the largest verdict of its kind, the jury hoped to send a message that if you’re going to run a nursing home, you better do it in a way that doesn’t jeopardize the health and welfare of its residents.

The jury came back with the huge punitive damages award the day after it found that the corporation Horizon West Healthcare and its nursing homes Colonial Healthcare committed elder abuse upon 79-year-old Frances Tanner. Tanner, a government worker who at one time worked for the FBI and Internal Revenue Service, was admitted into Colonial in March of 2005. After suffering a fall that went undiagnosed for days, she died seven months later for an infected bed sore.

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An elderly man with Alzheimer’s disease died as a result of a nursing home’s negligent care according to a report released by the California Department of Public Health. According to the investigation findings, the nursing home resident also was noted to have dysphasia, or difficulty swallowing. While being fed by a certified nursing assistant, the man began to cough and gasp for air. Though in obvious distress, no telephone call to emergency response was made for 20 minutes (something caregivers lied about to DPH). When paramedics arrived approximately 10 minutes later, the man was already dead.

The DPH issued a AA citation and an $80,000 fine for its failures.

The nursing home, Homewood Care Center in San Jose, was owned by Jack Easterday. Mr. Easterday was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison in 2007 for his willful failure to pay employment taxes. He was the owner of a company called Westline Medical Management, which owned Homewood Care Center and several other nursing homes in California.

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The California legislature has called for an investigation into why only one-third of the fines assessed against nursing homes for negligent care are being collected. The audit that was approved in February is expected to look how the funds are collected and how they’re spent.

Mike Feuer, D-Los Angeles told California Watch, “The whole point of having citation accounts and the penalty system is to deter nursing homes from doing anything but provide the highest quality care to residents. If the fines coming in are less than a third of (those) issued, it leaves one to wonder if the state is being as effective as it could be in protecting nursing home residents.”

Records obtained by California Watch reveal that in 2008 state regulators collected only $1.5 million of the $5 million that had been assessed against California skilled nursing facilities. In comparison, the same regulators have collected nearly 80 percent of the fines levied against hospitals. Kathleen Billingsley, the deputy director of the Department of Public Health Center for Healthcare Quality, said nursing homes who appeal fines do not have to pay until the process is completed.

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California Watch is out with a disturbing report alleging that California nursing homes that received more than $880 million in additional taxpayer funds under a law designed to boost care, took the money did the opposite by cutting staff and wages. [“Nursing homes received millions while cutting staff, wages“] In its investigation, California Watch found 232 California nursing homes that either cut staffing, or paid lower wages to workers after receiving money from the state.

It appears that many of the nursing homes investigated used the state money to improve their financial health, not the health of its residents, and those that cut the most staff had, not surprisingly, more deficiencies issued by state inspectors than those facilities that did not cut staff.

“There was an implicit good faith agreement that things would get better … and that was broken,” state Sen. Elaine Alquist, D-Santa Clara, told California Watch. “It was broken for the people of California and for a very vulnerable population – those that need the greatest care and those that can’t advocate for themselves.”

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It took jurors only five hours to convict 21-year-old Cesar Ulloa of criminal elder abuse for his brutal treatment of residents at the Calabasas nursing home where he worked. According to prosecutors, Ulloa would laugh as he attacked his victims, many of whom were to demented to be able to call for help. He faces life in prison.

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In one of the assaults, a fellow employee witnessed Ulloa jump on the chest of a non-verbal 78-year-old woman’s chest, and throwing her on the bed as she struggled. To another elderly male resident, Ulloa jumped off a dresser and landed with both knees on the man’s abdomen, seriously injuring the man. He apparently would laugh with delight while brutalizing the patients.

Suspicion over Ulloa actions was raised after the wife of a resident received an anonymous phone call the day after her husband’s funeral. The call said that her husband had been abused, and that his death may have been related to the abuse, something the family suspected. The police were notified, and the victim’s body exhumed for an autopsy that revealed more than 24 fractures. The man’s death was determined to be caused by blunt force trauma.

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The healthcare reform bill signed by President Obama this week will have an impact on nursing homes and long-term care. The most dramatic change will come in the form of long-term care insurance, and provision that was long championed by the Senator Edward Kennedy. Under the Community Living Assistance Services and Support Act (CLASS), all Americans will automatically be enrolled in a long-term care insurance program, but will have the option to opt out.

Under the Act, individuals will start paying a premium immediately, and will be able to use the benefit after five years of contribution to the program. The benefit, though, is not much, as it is expected to be about $50 per day to offset other long-term care costs.

The healthcare reform bill will also start to close the “donut hole” in Medicare Part D coverage for prescription drugs. Patients will immediately begin receiving a rebate for drug costs that fall into the gap, and drug manufacturers will be required to provide a discount on brand name drugs. Over time, the gap in coverage will be phased out entirely.

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The Sacramento Business Journal is out with an article accusing the State of California of exposing elderly nursing home residents to dangerous caregivers because state regulators have failed to implement a 2006 law that requires the creation of a centralized database for background checks on all long-term caregivers.

According to the article, an investigation by the state’s Senate Office of Oversight and Outcomes discovered at least 20 incidents where individuals who lost their certification as nursing assistance because of wrongdoing were cleared and hired in a different facility.

“There is no excuse for allowing people with known histories of abuse to work in residential care facilities for the elderly or as caregivers in any other setting,” said Michael Connors, an advocate with California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, a non-profit that advocates on behalf of nursing home and residential care residents.

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The tragic story of Barbara Fasold serves as a harrowing reminder of what happens when nursing home oversight fails. Ms. Fasold, a 76-year-old resident at a facility in DeLand, fell from her bed at 5:00 a.m., fracturing both legs and her shoulder. Despite the severity of her injuries, she lay on the floor for 12 agonizing hours before being discovered during a shift change. She passed away less than a week later.

While this specific tragedy occurred across the country, it highlights a systemic crisis that hits close to home for families in Oakland, California. From the hills of Montclair to the busy corridors of Jack London Square, families entrust Oakland skilled nursing facilities and assisted living centers with the safety of their loved ones. When that trust is broken by a fall—especially one followed by hours of abandonment—it isn’t just an accident; it is often a case of nursing home neglect.

The Alarming Reality of Falls in Long-Term Care

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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 results of its investigation. Here is some general information about making a complaint against a nursing home.

First, who can make a complaint? Under California law, any person can make a complaint about a nursing home; it does not just have to be the resident, family member, or responsible party. Complaints may be made anonymously.

When is a good time to make a complaint? A complaint should be made whenever one considers the treatment problems to be serious enough to report. It is usually a good idea to express your complaints to the facility first, but if you feel like you’re not being taken seriously, call DPH.

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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 against “what are probably thousands” of health care providers. The revelations apparently surprised federal health officials, who just last month proclaimed that “no data is missing.”

For almost twenty years the federal government has kept a database of disciplinary actions against doctors and dentist, and in 1999 individual state boards were required to include in the database reports on all other healthcare professional, including nurses, whose licenses were restricted or revoked. In California, however, not all penalized caregivers were included in the federal database. For example, California has formally disciplined 84 psychiatric technicians over the last two years, yet the federal database does not contain a single report of discipline against a psychiatric technician in the State of California.

The dangers of an incomplete database are obvious, as Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe of the Public Citizen’s Health Research Group observed, prospective employers of health care professions could be given “a false sense of security that somebody who may be really dangerous isn’t, because their name isn’t there.”

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