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Members of the staff at Bluegrass Care and Rehabilitation Center in Lexington, Kentucky, didn’t think their joke would get out of hand. They would attach sexually explicit song lyrics to photos of residents taken with their cell phone cameras and send them as text messages to other employees. “We were just having fun,” an employee told state investigators. “Everybody was on the cell phone 24/7.”
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 Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services has issued its most serious citation against a Winchester nursing home and as a result it will lose its Medicare and Medicaid funding, according to the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader. The citation is based on claims of abuse and neglect at Winchester Centre for Health and Rehabilitation that Health and Family Services officials would not detail. However Nursing Home Ombudsman Agency executive director Kathy Gannoe says her agency has received 31 complaints about the nursing home. Almost all were resolved satisfactorily, she says. However, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services plans to move forward on its plans to terminate its contract with the home by February 7.
Former nurse’s aide Jaclyn Dawn VanWinkle doesn’t understand why her dancing and singing to a nursing home patient has caused such a ruckus, according to Lexington (Ken.) Living. The 25-year-old woman was arrested and charged with wanton neglect of an 84-year-old resident at Madison Manor Nursing Home in Richmond, Ken., where VanWinkle was employed. At least eight other employees face criminal charges, according to the report.
Armeda Thomas’ family was desperate to know the origin of Armeda’s mysterious bruises. The 84-year-old woman lived in Madison Manor nursing home in Richmond, Ken., and has Alzheimer’s Disease, which made getting the answers from her simply impossible. Even nursing home staff couldn’t tell family members why Armeda was covered in bruises. So the family took matters in their own hands and, last August, without knowledge of the nursing home, placed a hidden camera in Armeda’s room and pointed it to her bed.
About 1,400 nursing home residents are suing a Milwaukee, Minnesota-based nursing home chain for consumer fraud, according to the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune. The class-action lawsuit alleges that Extendicare partook in deceptive marketing practices to lure deep-pocketed seniors with high-reimbursement conditions into substandard homes that were not equipped to provide the level of care the patients required.
The man who checked his disabled sister out of a Georgetown, Kentucky, nursing home in 2006 and whose car her mummified body was found in the truck of last week, has been arrested, according to Lexington Herald-Leader.
