Word: california
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Oliva's tale will put a human face on a damning study by the General Accounting Office that will be the subject of hearings by the Committee on Aging this week. The panel has summoned two insiders--a former California nursing-home nurse and a current nursing-home inspector for the state--to offer firsthand accounts of the horrors. The women--called "Clara B." and "Florence N." by the committee--will speak from behind a screen to shield them from retaliation by the powerful nursing-home industry and the agency that provides care to California's elderly...
...improve for a while when state inspectors showed up for their predictably timed annual visit. "The attitude was to put a Band-Aid on it until the state left, and then it'd go right back to the way it was," she says. The inspector, who has been visiting California nursing homes for years, told TIME her complaints are regularly ignored because of the "cronyism" that exists between the state overseers and nursing-home operators. "Once we write down violations, the nursing homes complain and our superiors keep us from going back or else they dismiss our citations," she says...
...report, following up on a story that appeared in TIME last fall, says more than half the suspicious deaths studied in California nursing homes were probably due to neglect, including malnutrition and dehydration. The study says that nearly 1 in 3 California nursing homes has been cited by state inspectors for "serious or potentially life-threatening care problems" and that the same problems probably exist across the nation. These are likely to grow as the baby boomers become grandparents and the rocketing elderly population puts even greater pressure on the nation's nursing homes. Senator Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican...
...Rasor of the death certificates of all Californians who died in nursing homes from 1986 through 1993. In more than 7% of the cases, lack of food or water, untreated bedsores or infections were listed as a cause of death. This probe led Grassley to order the GAO to California to investigate. The GAO's medical review of 62 residents who died in trouble-prone California nursing homes showed that 34 of them received poor care that probably contributed to their demise. Applying the GAO's percentage of negligent California deaths to the nation's nursing-home population suggests that...
...Everyone knows that profits and good care are not compatible" is how Pat McGinnis, executive director of California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, explains the persistence of nursing-home abuses. But a recent spate of multimillion-dollar jury awards to nursing-home residents and their families because of poor care may force some homes to improve. A California woman won a $95 million verdict after the jury was told how she broke her shoulder and shattered her hip (last month a judge cut the award to $3 million), and a jury awarded $6.3 million to the family of a Florida...