Investigation Reveals Failures in Protecting Oklahoma Nursing Home Residents

Nurses who used to work at Rest Haven Nursing Home in Tulsa describe it as a house of horrors.

"There was verbal abuse, physical abuse, lots of things reported," said Rita Rodriguez, a former nurse at Rest Haven.

She says Rest Haven was an unsafe environment that, even after complaints, never got better. She listed some of the worst offenses.

"The rats, the roaches, the filth," said Rodriguez.

Rodriguez had been a nurse at Rest Haven for a couple of years when another veteran nurse, Toby Dale, began working there this year.

"I've seen patients that were covered in maggots, that you know was taken to the showers, tub area, and put into a vat of water with half a cup of bleach and dipped, kind of like a dog," said Dale.

Both nurses say Rest Haven was the worst nursing home they've ever worked in and say it should have been shut down years ago. They called the Oklahoma Impact Team after they were fired from Rest Haven, they say, for alerting the state to patient abuse.

"They really don't care about the residents," said Dale. "They just, they belittle them. They make fun of them. They talk about them. They cuss them."

"It was just a whole lot of patient abuse that never was dealt with," said Rodriguez.

Inside Rest Haven, nursing home staff told our undercover producers Rest Haven was a happy place where residents were well taken care of. But the hallways and facilities were dirty and smelly and at one point, an employee blocked off a patient room to keep our producers from looking inside.

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Investigation Reveals Failures in Protecting Oklahoma Nursing Home Residents

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