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Archived
News and Projects Trouble at Care Homes
Two long-term-care companies that the state health department acknowledges contributed to its recent report on nursing home staffing in California possess questionable records, including poor care, low staffing, abused patients and fraud.
A major critic of the report, who last week said the document ignored serious care issues involving staffing in the state's 1,400 nursing homes, called the involvement of the companies, Country Villa Health Services and Beverly Enterprises Inc., troubling.
"These are entities that have tremendous problems with staffing. This is like the state saying, 'Hello Mr. Fox, how's the security system in the hen house?'" said Prescott Cole, a California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform staff attorney. "You have to ask, 'are these the people who are going to help?'"
Records show that since 1995 the state health department fined Country Villa $107,075 for at least 72 violations involving poor care.
Cases against Country Villa included the beating of elderly residents, forcing them to wallow in their own waste as punishment for needing to use the bathroom and staff telling a woman who reported a mouse in her bed that she instead suffered from "hallucinations." In fact, rodents infested the Los Angeles facility.
Arkansas-based Beverly Enterprises, the nation's largest nursing home owner with more than 500 U.S. facilities, pleaded guilty last year to federal charges of Medicare fraud. It agreed to pay $175 million in fines and sell 10 nursing homes in several states, including California.
Among its homes in this state is Beverly La Cumbre in Santa Barbara. The state Department of Justice began a criminal investigation of this facility after a nurse there killed herself last year. She wrote in a suicide note that her supervisors forced her to cover up incidents of patient abuse.
According to an appendix of the staffing report, the health department solicited information from 66 organizations and individuals, including Country Villa Health Services and Beverly Enterprises. The report acknowledged 13 of those entities, including these two companies, on a separate page, thanking them "for contributing to the completion of this report." The department also listed that Country Villa submitted 'staffing guidelines."
A Beverly spokesman in Arkansas said Thursday he didn't know what the company submitted and it was too late in the day to determine it.
Country Villa CEO Eldon Teper said he submitted staffing policies and tips to help deal with "the massive staffing crunch in California." He dismissed criticism. "I am very proud of the care in Country Villa's facilities. We are not perfect by any means."
State health spokeswoman Lea Brooks said her department used an open process in soliciting data for the report, mandated by legislation that Gov. Gray Davis signed last year. The department made the report public last week, nearly two months after its May 1 deadline.
"Our goal was to be inclusive,'' Brooks said. "Those companies must have expressed an interest." She said the department listed in the acknowledgments anyone who arranged a meeting with health department officials and offered information verbally. The department didn't take the records of those individuals or companies into account, she said.
Cole said, though, that the department could have easily found companies with better records and care histories from which to gather advice.
"Companies like this are going to think they did nothing wrong,'' Cole said. "Obviously, the citations that Country Villa got mean nothing to Country Villa. There are cleaner places that do exist. Not all facilities get citations."
The report concluded that while the state's nursing homes remain largely understaffed, it found the legal minimum care level -- that each patient receive 3.2 hours of direct staff care daily -- adequate.
Cole and other critics, such as National Senior Citizen Law Center attorney Eric Carlson, Assembly Majority Leader Kevin Shelley, D-San Francisco, and a union representing nursing home workers, expressed dissatisfaction with the report's findings. Read More Archived News Stories AB896 General Human Interest Litigation State Budget
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