Articles Posted in Southern California Elder Abuse

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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 all the time to recommend nursing homes, but rarely can provide a good answer. In our experience, the best guarantor of good care is an attentive family who visits frequently.

Here is a list of the top 25 Southern California nursing homes as ranked as the U.S. News and World Report ranks as the best:

1. Rady Children’s Hospital Bernardo Center, San Diego

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This story is flat-out disturbing, and started with a concern we have heard many times from the families of our nursing home abuse clients. It began with Phyllis Peters could not wake up her 97-year-old mother, who was residing in Kern Valley Nursing Home. When she complained to Gwen Hughes, the nursing home’s director, Hughes would “chemically restrain” the patient by giving her powerful anti-psychotic drugs to shut her up. Hughes did this to other residents in the nursing home, and three of them died.

In a report from the California Attorney General, Hughes ordered one patient drugged because she “glared” at her. Another was given high doses of an anti-psychotic drug for throwing a carton of milk. Several residents became severely malnourished, and were left in bed drooling and emaciated.

“In a couple cases, elderly people were actually held down, restrained against their will, and given excessive amounts of medicine to keep them quiet,” said AG Jerry Brown.

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According to new research from Brown University, elderly Hispanics are more likely to live in inferior nursing homes than their white counterparts.

In an article out in the January 10 edition of Health Affairs, a team of researchers takes the first comprehensive look at the types of nursing facilities Hispanic elderly live in, and how the care at those homes compares to homes that house a primarily white patient population. According to the study, the disparity is sharp.

“The most shocking finding is the pervasiveness of disparities in nursing home care that are primarily white, compared to nursing homes that are a mix of whites and Hispanic residences,” said Mary Fennell, professor of sociology and community health at Brown.

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A Ventura nursing home called Fillmore Convalescent Center, its owner, and one of its employees were hit with a $7.75 million verdict yesterday after a jury found them liable for elder abuse. It has to be one of the largest verdicts in California in a case involving nursing home abuse or neglect.

The facts are egregious. In 2006, the family of 71-year-old Maria Arellano, a stroke victim who was also non-verbal, began to notice suspicious bruising. They complained to the nursing home administration, but it failed to look into it. The family then placed a hidden camera in Ms. Arellano’s room, which caught caregiver Monica Garcia slapping Arellano, pulling her hair, bending her fingers, and treating her violently. When the tape was revealed, Garcia was charged with criminal acts, and the family brought an elder abuse lawsuit against the nursing home.

The lawyer for Arellano, Greg Johnson, must have done an excellent job. He told the Ventura County Star that he offered to settle the case for $500,000, but was rebuffed. The nursing home, through its attorney Tom Beach, never offered a dime to resolve the case. “There was a lot of arrogance,” said Johnson.

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In their ongoing investigation into California nursing, Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein of ProPublica are out with an article on temporary nursing agencies being a haven for unfit nurses. Temp nursing agencies are used frequently by local hospitals and nursing homes to fill nursing positions that have been vacated for some reason; usually for day or two, but sometimes open-ended.

In its investigation, ProPublica found numerous instances in which the agencies, desperate to find certified nurses, failed to perform background checks or ignored warnings from hospitals about weak nurses in order to fill nursing orders. It is a profitable undertaking; the temporary nursing industry is a $4 billion industry.

Some of the other ProPublica findings were startling:

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The State of California has announced that healthcare providers, namely nurses, that have abused drugs will face more stringent guidelines to maintain their licenses. After treatment, the nurses will be required to pay for regular drug testing. After a negative test, the nurse will be able to return to work, but during the first year, will be required to undergo 104 drug tests. The new guidelines state that a single failure of a drug test will result in an immediate suspension of the nursing license. In addition, the state will be permitted to publically identify nurses who are being subject to this increased supervision.

These new regulations follow an L.A. Times investigation earlier this year (and blogged about here) that found several problems in the licensing, certification, and regulation of California nurses. In that investigation, it was revealed that numerous nurses with documented drug problems were allowed to continue working without consequence, and that nursing complaints were taking years to resolve.

The new regulations can be found here.

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In a strongly worded report, the California Senate Office of Oversight and Outcomes recommended major reforms to the California long-term care ombudsman program. The responsibility of the Ombudsman program is to investigate and resolve complaints made by individual residents in nursing homes.

According to the California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform (CANHR), nursing home and assisted living facility residents in California at an increasing risk of elder abuse because ombudsman funding has been severely cut and the state ombudsman office has established unreasonable restrictions on ombudsman reporting of abuse.

The state report, entitled California’s Elder Abuse Investigators: Ombudsman Shackled by Conflicting Laws and Duties, revealed that ombudsman complaint referrals to the nursing home licensing agency dropped by a stunning 44 percent in the last year after the Governor Schwarzenegger slashed funding to the fledgling ombudsman program. Assisted living facilities have been affected as well. During the same period, complaints by ombudsman to California’s Community Care Licensing regarding assisted living and residential care facilities also dropped by more than 40 percent.

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The Chicago Tribune recently published a brief article called 5 Things to Know about Psychotropics, which I thought I would pass along to you. Here are the five things:

Your rights: A nursing facility cannot administer a psychotropic drug without a physician’s order, which by law requires informed consent and a legitimate diagnosis. The standard of care requires that nursing staff must first try to calm patients, and other possible causes of agitation must be ruled out, such as infection.

The consent: Before psyschtropics can be used consent must be obtained by the “responsible party” of the resident, usually the person with power of attorney. The consent must be in writing.

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In the 10 years since I took my first case against a nursing home for elder abuse, I have seen a growing number of homes going without liability insurance. While the uninsured problem used to be confined to the small mom-and-pop assisted living facilities with 6 to 12 beds, now I am seeing in large, institutional-type skilled nursing facilities. On Friday, the Oakland Tribune did an excellent article on this problem.

The article profiles the story of 39-year-old Grover Brown, a multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s patient with paraplegia. Brown was a resident of High Street Care Center in East Oakland. High Street is owned by Trinity Health Systems, whose president, Randal Kleis, has operated about a dozen facilities all over California under several corporate names.

While in the care of High Street, Brown developed a pressure ulcer on his coccyx, which, due to neglect, worsened to the point that doctors were required to remove his tailbone to curtail the deep infection. Brown and his family hired an elder abuse attorney, who sued High Street for abuse and neglect under California’s elder abuse laws, which also protect “dependent adults” like Brown.

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The Del Rosa Villa nursing home in San Bernardino received the state’s harshest citation after investigators concluded that inadequate care led to a resident’s suicide. The California Department of Public Health issued a AA citation and a fine of $90,000.

According to reports, on June 11, 2009 a 52-year-old resident was found hanging from a fence in the parking lot of the nursing home. He apparently had rolled his wheelchair through a back entrance to the nursing home and into parking lot where he hung himself with a belt

The man’s care plan, which all skilled nursing facilities must maintain for patients, required that he be under suicide watch at all times, and that a nursing assistant admitted to investigators that she made a mistake. It was not the man’s first attempt at suicide. He was in the facility from an acute care hospital where he was admitted after throwing himself in front of a moving vehicle.

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