› $580,975,000 verdict in personal injury case
Florida state regulators have recently fined Azalea Court nursing home in West Palm Beach, Florida $16,000 after a patient was found on the floor with maggots crawling out of his leg cast, according to On Call with Phil Galewitz, from the Palm Beach Post.
Several staff members at a Kentucky nursing home were fired recently after an investigation found that employees had taken inappropriate photos and made audio recordings of residents at the facility, attached them to songs with sexual lyrics, and circulated them to other employees at the nursing home, according to the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader.
The news took the staff at Quality Care Health Center in Lebanon, Tennessee by surprise. The Tennessee Department of Health issued a ban on new admissions, claiming those at the home are in immediate jeopardy, according to News Channel 5.
The announcement was spurred by a recent state and Federal Center for Medicare-Medicaid Services inspection that found the center in violation of physician services, nursing services and medical records.
Here is an update on a story we reported last month about an investigation into a Rockland County, N.Y., nursing home where a 90-year-old nun was killed when the closet in her room toppled over onto her. According to Lo Hud, New York’s Lower Hudson Valley newspaper, in the wake of the investigation into Summit Park Nursing Care, the patient-services administrator has announced he plans to resign and the maintenance director is taking an early retirement package. The nursing home’s patient-services administrator Aldo Trolani also served as the county’s acting commissioner of hospitals for the Department of Hospitals.
No one expected Sister Mary Murray to die the way she did.
While in her room at the Summit Park Nursing Home in Rockland County, New York, the 90-year-old nun was crushed and eventually died after the closet in her room toppled over onto her. Her family accepted the nursing home’s explanation. It was just a freak accident.
Then came the ABC 7 Eyewitness News investigation that revealed that two other residents in the home were injured by falling closets.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is paying millions of dollars in taxpayer money each year to nursing homes, some of which have been cited for below-average care, according to a report by the Des Moines (Iowa) Register. The monies come from bonuses paid to nursing homes for following programs that in many cases are legally required, such as paying minimum wages and installing fire sprinklers for resident safety.
Pleasant Manor Nursing Home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was anything but pleasant for some residents there, according to the Tulsa World.
For one resident and her family, it was downright stressful.
“Every day, American families face difficult decisions about whether to move a loved one into a nursing home. There are nearly 17,000 nursing homes in the United States that currently care for 1.6 million residents — a figure expected to quadruple to 6.6 million residents by 2050. The quality of care provided by these nursing homes has been the subject of much scrutiny in recent years.” – U.S. Congress Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Chairman Henry A. Waxman, 110th Congress
According to the National Center on Elder Abuse (NCEA), no one knows precisely how many older Americans are being abused, neglected, or exploited. This is because there are no official national statistics.
