Nearly 40 percent of the state’s 437 nursing homes received below-average scores during their most recent inspections due to a troubling catalog of lapses and abuses that are putting vulnerable seniors at serious risk, a Herald review has found.
The Bay State nursing home population is about 45,000. The Herald’s findings come at a time when the number of residents in such homes is expected to surge as baby boomers age into their 80s.
With so many boomers in the nursing home pipeline, advocates and families say they are extremely worried about the quality of care today and in the future.
“I think our system doesn’t require nursing homes to be good,” said Janet Wells, director of public policy at the National Citizens’ Coalition for Nursing Home Reform, who blames lack of oversight and low staffing for poor quality.
A Herald examination of two years of inspection reports and complaint investigations for the worst-performing nursing homes in eastern Massachusetts bears out Wells’ concerns. The documents, provided by the Department of Public Health after months of public records requests, revealed dozens cases of poor staff training, unsanitary living conditions and overall neglect. For example:
At a Danvers home in 2008, nurses failed to perform CPR on a resident after finding her unresponsive. a doctor arrived 15 minutes later and pronounced her dead. The state investigated and faulted the home for providing poor care. In addition, a nurse said she falsified the dead woman’s medical records, the state found.
Residents are not always safe from their peers, as evidenced by the Sept. 24 murder of 100-year-old Dartmouth nursing home patient Elizabeth Barrow who was strangled in her bed. Her roommate, Laura Lundquist, 98, has been charged with murder.
A woman at a Lawrence nursing home informed investigators she was in “unbearable” pain for days because staff failed to reorder her pain medication on time.
Investigators caught a Lawrence nursing home resident smoking while using an oxygen tank. a resident was found flicking ashes on her bed sheets in a Chelsea home. In Danvers, a smoking room lacked a fire extinguisher.
In 2008 and 2009, there were 71 complaints of neglect and physical, sexual and verbal abuse of residents at 40 homes reviewed by the Herald. of those complaints, 11 were deemed valid by the state. In 41 cases, the state couldn’t determine whether the abuse occurred. The rest were deemed invalid.
In many cases, staff failed to develop or follow through on plans required to protect residents from extreme weight loss, falls and leaving the home unattended, leading to serious injuries and health setbacks.
“The negligence is what really bothers me,” said Marshall Reilly of Centerville, whose 88-year-old mother, Janet Reilly, died in 2002 after slipping in a pool of her own urine at a Cape Cod nursing home. “She didn’t have to die.”
The nursing home went bankrupt and reopened under a new name. Reilly is fighting for payment of the $97,000, plus interest, that a Suffolk Superior Court awarded him in damages in 2008.
The Reilly case is emblematic of overall nursing home failings, said David J. Hoey, Reilly’s lawyer. Nursing home staff kept poor records, failed to provide a safe environment and did not supervise the patient, Hoey said.
“The nursing home industry is smart enough at this point in time to be able to address and prevent a number of things – urinary tract infections, pneumonia, falls and fractures and bed sores. This should not be happening anymore,” Hoey said.
Below average