It was an early-morning awakening that Alfredo Navas said he'll never forget: His sister on the phone, telling him that their 85-year-old mother had drowned in a shallow drainage pond behind the facility that was caring for her.
But the safeguards his family had assumed were in place to monitor an elderly woman with dementia - cameras, door locks and vigilant caretakers - failed his mother in 2008, Navas told the Senate's Special Committee on Aging on Wednesday [11/2/11].
Those abuses and others were chronicled in a Miami Herald series "Neglected to Death," which focused this spring on critical breakdowns in Florida's enforcement system, including failures by the state's Agency on Health Care Administration to fully investigate deaths or to shut down some of the worst offenders among Florida's 2,850 assisted-living facilities.
"This is America in the year 2011, and these kind of things shouldn't be happening," said Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who read aloud of the worst examples of abuse.
They include a 75-year-old Alzheimer's patient in Clearwater torn apart by an alligator after he wandered away from his assisted-living facility for the fourth time; a 71-year-old mentally ill Hialeah man who died from burns after he was left in a bathtub filled with scalding water; and a 74-year-old Kendall woman who was restrained for six hours until the bindings cut into her skin and killed her.
Federal regulators and lawmakers both said that they are uninterested in the federal government being responsible for regulating living facilities. Although more states are using Medicaid money to pay for some portion of assisted living care for the poor, the federal government has a limited role in the facilities their oversight has been and will likely continue to be a state duty.
But federal regulators do want more of an ability to ensure states are doing their part to enforce laws and safety regulations already on the books, said Barbara Edwards, who directs the disabled and elderly health programs group at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Full Article and Source:
Abuses in Assisted Living Facilities Come Under Senate Panel's Spotlight
3 comments:
Congratulations Miami Herald for getting this much attention!
Government sems realy not to care if they don't/won't stop the abuse and neglect.
I think these senate hearings are just to make us think they care. And then they go back to what they were doing before the hearings.
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