Bob,
We all have the same wish. However, we do all get old and our society does
not value the elderly. It values youth and beauty. Unless we are lucky
enough to have loving families to advocate for us and, perhaps, enough money
to ensure quality care, we are all at risk as we age. And even with those
advantages, as our medical system becomes more and more bureaucratized and
profit driven, it is difficult to secure adequate care.
Miriam
________________________________
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bob Hachey
Sent: Saturday, July 11, 2015 11:56 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Tragic Case of Nursing Home Neglect
Hi all,
Here's a truly sad story from the Boston Globe about horrible neglect in a
Massachusetts nursing home. Corporate profit trumps quality care here. .
This one makes me hope I'll never need to live in a nursing home.
Bob Hachey
At Brockton nursing home, questions of faulty care
The first sound Karen Adams heard as she walked into the room at Braemoor
Health Center in Brockton was her mother screaming in pain. Marie Crean had
fallen two days earlier and broken her left hip, but no one at the nursing
home had noticed. A pressure sore soon developed on the 85-year-old's left
heel because her leg was nearly immobile after the fall last year. But that,
too, was overlooked by Braemoor staffers, and spread "like wildfire," Adams
said. Crean died two months later, on Aug. 2. State regulators investigated
Crean's care at Braemoor and cited the nursing home for failing to provide
timely evaluation and treatment after her fall. "There was no documentation
of an assessment having been performed in response to [Crean's] complaints
of pain," investigators concluded. By the time Crean was taken to the
hospital two days after her fall, her level of pain was "10 out of 10 (on a
scale of 0-10, zero being no pain and 10 the most severe pain),"
investigators found. The Boston Globe Marie Crean. Crean's treatment at
Braemoor casts a new spotlight on Synergy Health Centers, the owner of the
Brockton nursing home. Synergy's rapid expansion since December 2012 - it
won state approval Monday to acquire its 11th Massachusetts nursing home, in
Salem - has been matched by mounting complaints. More broadly, Crean's
experience raises questions about the state health department's oversight of
the 414 nursing homes in Massachusetts, and the thousands of frail residents
who live in them. A Massachusetts law passed last summer requires the health
department to establish a public hearing process before nursing homes are
sold or closed, yet state health officials have not put that into effect.
The department is still working on rules to implement the law. Synergy has
acquired four of its Massachusetts nursing homes since that law was passed.
State health department spokesman Scott Zoback said in a statement the
department is closely monitoring Synergy. At Braemoor, Adams had a clear
vantage point to view what was happening inside: Not only is she Crean's
daughter, she also was working at Braemoor when her mother was admitted
there. The 58-year-old Halifax resident, with more than two decades'
experience working in nursing homes, didn't want her mother to go to
Braemoor because she worried that the new owners were cutting too many
corners and that overwhelmed nurses were unable to provide high-quality care
in the nursing home, licensed to care for 120 residents. But Adams said it
was the only nursing center near the family's South Shore home with an
available room in late April 2014. Her mother needed a few weeks of
rehabilitation after being hospitalized for a urinary tract infection.
Crean, a spirited woman who raised four children and loved to dance, had
worked as a grocery store cashier until she was 79. But in her later years,
she had diabetes, which left her legally blind. Then dementia crept in and
her hearing faded. Reluctantly, Adams placed her mother in Braemoor, but
derived a measure of comfort hoping Crean might get extra attention because
her daughter worked there. "You usually take pride where you work, and you
figure [a family member] would get better care," Adams said. "But this was a
disaster. Braemoor's executive director, Paula Topjian, did not return phone
calls from the Globe. Synergy's spokesman, Uri Turk, declined comment.
Synergy bought Braemoor in July 2013, and Adams said the new company's
administrators quickly began pinching pennies. The nursing home, she said,
would run out of alcohol pads used when drawing blood, and administrators
suggested staffers improvise using hand sanitizer instead. Adams said
administrators told nurses not to worry about completing their daily written
reports detailing each patient's care if they didn't have time at the end of
the overnight shift and to simply provide an oral update to the morning
staff. At the same time, Adams said, Braemoor was admitting an increasing
number of short-term rehabilitation patients because the company received
more money to treat them. But no extra nurses were hired to care for them,
she said. By fall 2013, Adams said she called regulators in the state health
department to relay her concerns, but little seemed to change. "Maybe if
they had really come in and checked, this would not have happened to my
mother," Adams said. Zoback, the Department of Public Health spokesman, said
the agency "inspects and monitors nursing homes within the available legal
framework. "We will continue to closely monitor Synergy Health to ensure
resident safety , " he said. Adams worked the overnight shift at Braemoor,
then would visit with her mother in the morning, as nurse aides roused Crean
for breakfast. A nurse who found Crean lying on the floor in her room at
Braemoor in May 2014 wrote in a report that Crean was not injured and had no
pain. That's what Adams said she was told when a nurse called her at home
that evening, a night she was not scheduled to work. The day after Crean's
fall, Braemoor staffers sent her to routine physical and oc'cup'ational
therapy sessions, even as she complained that her left hip hurt, and the
therapists voiced concerns about her apparent pain and mounting agitation,
state records show. Nurses finally ordered a hip X-ray for Crean. But the
requested X-ray was for the wrong hip. It wasn't until Adams returned to
work and found her mother screaming in pain two days after the fall that
Braemoor officials sent Crean to a hospital. There, doctors determined she
had broken her left hip and needed surgery. State investigators cited the
nursing home for deficient care and ordered administrators to file a plan
with state regulators detailing how the nursing home intended to prevent
similar incidents. Braemoor's plan stated that it retrained staff on how to
detect "nonverbal indicators of pain" in patients with dementia, and how to
assess patients for injuries after a fall. Adams left her job at Braemoor
soon after her mother's fall and made plans to care for her mother at home
as soon as she recovered strength following the hip surgery. Meanwhile, the
family visited Crean frequently at Braemoor to keep a close eye on her. By
three weeks after the surgery, Crean appeared to be gaining strength. Adams,
who joined her mother for dinner one evening at Braemoor, said she told
nurses she would help get her mother ready for bed. When Adams removed
Crean's socks, she discovered a quarter-sized pressure sore on her mother's
left heel, with skin so deteriorated it was black. Gretchen Ertl for The
Boston Globe The Braemoor Health Center in Brockton. Nurses were supposed to
be checking Crean's feet daily, according to patient records, because
diabetes raised the risk of foot infections and other complications. The
records also indicate medical workers were supposed to be rubbing cream on
Crean's heels twice a day to help prevent pressure sores. On each shift,
nurses signed off that Crean was receiving foot care, yet no one apparently
noticed the skin rotting on her left heel. Furious, Adams removed her mother
from Braemoor and brought her to her home, caring for her mother with help
from hospice nurses. "The staff did not consistently document that diabetic
foot care was completed," a state investigation of Braemoor noted. But with
several inconsistent entries in Braemoor's nursing logs, investigators said
they were "unable to determine" whether Braemoor was at fault for Crean's
pressure sore, according to the final report issued in February. The rotting
skin around Crean's pressure sore proved relentless, and poor circulation
related to diabetes exacerbated her condition. The family followed her
wishes that no aggressive treatments, including amputation, be taken, and
Crean died at home in August, surrounded by family. Adams said she doesn't
entirely blame Braemoor's nurses for the cascade of errors in her mother's
care because she knows firsthand how overwhelming the workload became after
Synergy took over. The facility has been through five directors of nursing
and three administrators in the past two years, an upheaval that has been
hard on staff, said Marion Salisbury, a Braemoor nursing supervisor who
recently retired. Adams' former colleagues may have made mistakes, but Adams
said, "I blame the owners for not paying to have [enough] staff there.
Meanwhile, financial reports filed by Synergy indicate that four companies
owned by Synergy's founder and chief executive, Avi Lipschutz, received more
than $600,000 in "management fees" from Braemoor last year, and another
related company received $300,000 for rental fees. "My mother worked her
whole life," Adams said, tearing up as she thought about her mother's final
months. "Finally, something happened to her, and that's the best [treatment]
she got, after a lifetime of work. Kay Lazar can be reached at
Kay.Lazar@xxxxxxxxx Follow her on Twitter @GlobeKayLazar . .