Arizona assisted living facilities and nursing homes aren't required to track violent incidents among residents, leaving seniors vulnerable. Two women have been murdered and many more seniors have been injured in Arizona senior living facilities. These steps could help make them safer.
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Woman in Phoenix senior living facility dies after being beaten by another resident
There are two bills being considered right now that supporters say would help protect people from losing their rights and their assets.
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Arizona man pushes for changes to state's probate laws
Joseph Boles, Jr. appointed himself beneficiary or trustee of multiple families' wills and trusts without written consent.
ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — The Florida Supreme Court suspended prominent St. Augustine attorney and former city mayor Joe Boles after he admitted to misconduct and conflict of interest following an investigation by the Florida Bar.
The 90-day suspension comes after a judge determined Boles showed "a pattern of misconduct" in violating Bar rules governing conflicts of interest. The Bar filed its complaint against Boles last November after receiving two complaints from Boles' clients and discovering a third concerning case while investigating.
Boles, who specializes in estate planning and elder law, serves as the president and chairman of the St. Johns County Council on Aging. He served as St. Augustine mayor from 2006 to 2014, and as a City Commissioner for two years before that.
According to court records in the case, Boles designated himself as a surrogate designated beneficiary or backup successor trustee without getting written consent from his clients.
The original complaint names three victims.
In the first victim's case, the complaint says Boles was hired in 2020 to create a trust for a woman with aggressive cancer. The woman's designated successor trustee said Boles appointed himself as backup successor trustee against both women's wishes. Boles denied this and told Bar investigators he did so with the client's permission. But Bar investigators determined he failed to obtain written consent to do so, as required.
In a second case, a woman said she met with Boles in 2015 for his offer of free will preparation and then again in 2021 to modify her will and request a trust. She alleges that after reviewing the documents, she discovered that Boles was named as trustee of the trust, and Boles' law partner (and stepson) was named backup successor.
The complaint says "[Boles] unilaterally appointed himself as the personal representative in her will, appointed, himself as her healthcare surrogate, and appointed himself as [the client's] preneed guardian in the event of her future incapacity."
The client ultimately hired a different attorney to assist her with revoking the trust and drafting new estate planning document.
Boles said he had the client's permission, but acknowledged he "failed to obtain the written informed consent ... to appoint himself," as required by law.
During its investigation into the two complaints, the Bar also
discovered a third case in which Boles named himself as a surrogate
designated beneficiary in the will.
The complaint says Boles; "drafted and filed affidavits for the beneficiaries designated in the will ... in which they gave up all of their rights and responsibilities in the estate and designated respondent as the surrogate beneficiary."
Boles told investigators he was asked to do so by his clients, but investigators found he failed to advise them to seek independent legal counsel before signing the waivers. Ultimately, Boles handled this case on a pro bono basis and distributed the proceeds of the sale of the home to the beneficiaries.
In recommending discipline in the case, the designated "referee," 4th Circuit Judge Meredith Charbula said she took into account several mitigating factors, including Boles' "absence of a prior disciplinary record; timely good faith effort to make restitution or to rectify the consequences of the misconduct; full and free disclosure to the bar or cooperative attitude toward the proceedings; character or reputation; and remorse."
The judge also found no evidence that Boles wrongfully appropriated any money or assets to his own use.
As part of the suspension, Boles is prohibited from accepting new
business until he is reinstated. He will also pay disciplinary costs of
$2,565. He will be automatically reinstated after the suspension is
completed.
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Former St. Augustine mayor, elder law attorney suspended for misconduct, conflicts of interest
(MOUNT VERNON, Ohio) — A former Knox County sheriff’s deputy pleaded guilty today on six felony charges related to theft from an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s disease, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced today.
“Today’s guilty plea holds the criminals accountable for their financial abuse,” Yost said. “The theft charge alone in this case carries a potential sentence of up to 11 years in prison and a $50,000 fine – a punishment that should serve as a deterrent to anyone thinking about ripping off a senior citizen.”
Daniel Bobo of Gambier pleaded guilty to theft, a first-degree felony; three counts of telecommunications fraud, third- and fourth-degree felonies; and two counts of misuse of credit cards, a second-degree felony.
Bobo is a former deputy sergeant with the Knox County Sheriff’s office. He resigned on Sept. 3, 2021, following an indictment in the case.
Bobo’s wife, Elisabeth Bobo, pleaded guilty on April 18 to one count of misuse of credit cards, a fourth-degree felony, and one count of telecommunication fraud, a fifth-degree felony.
Both Daniel and Elisabeth Bobo will be sentenced on June 22 and are expected to pay restitution upon sentencing.
The Bobos befriended Kay and Richard Hoppe and helped the elderly couple move into a Mount Vernon nursing home. After Richard Hoppe died in 2018, the Bobos used a power of attorney granted by the Hoppes to Danial Bobo to access credit cards in the Hoppe’s name and bank accounts that contained the Hoppe’s assets. The Bobos used more than $500,000 for their own personal expenses. Suffering from dementia attributed to Alzheimer’s disease, Kay Hoppe passed away in 2020 at the age of 78 and Danial Bobo was named the executor of the estate.
The attorney general’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI) investigated the case, and the Special Prosecutions Section of Yost’s office is prosecuting the case.
May is Older Americans Month, designed to recognize the achievements of our older Ohioans. It is also a reminder to be vigilant in protecting elders against fraud and abuse.
The Elder Justice Unit – a collaborative effort of the attorney general’s Crime Victim Services, Consumer Protection, Health Care Fraud and Social Prosecutions sections and BCI – works to educate Ohioans about the warning signs and risks of financial exploitation. Elderly people, especially, are vulnerable to such crime..png)
Contact: Tony Mangan, Communications Director, 605-773-6878
Ramona Woman Sentenced for Grand Theft
PIERRE, S.D. – South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley has announced that Melba Jean Bickett of Ramona, S.D. has been sentenced to two years in the South Dakota Women’s Prison after pleading guilty to one count of Grand Theft. Both years were suspended on the condition that Bickett serve 60 days in the Lake County Jail and perform 40 hours of Community Service.
Between Jan.1, 2008 and Dec. 31, 2013, while working as a teller for First American State Bank, Bickett took $153,000 from her father’s bank account and moved the money into her bank account or her son’s bank account. All the transactions were done without her father’s permission.
Bickett was sentenced Monday in Kingsbury County Court. She also was ordered to pay back the entire $153,000 to her father’s estate.
The
case was investigated by the Lake County Sheriff’s office, the
Kingsbury County Sheriff’s office, and the South Dakota Division of
Criminal Investigation. The case was prosecuted by the South Dakota
Attorney General’s Office and its Elder Abuse and Financial Exploitation
Unit.
by Melissa Evans
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| Danielle Curtiss of Long Beach sought a mental health conservatorship for her son, who has schizophrenia, for two years. Photo by Thomas R. Cordova. |
At 18, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. During the next two years, he was either hospitalized or placed on involuntary psychiatric holds some 20 times. He repeatedly threatened to kill himself. “I don’t want to live anymore,” he would say.
Over the years, Curtiss says she filed at least a dozen missing person reports after he ran away from home or bolted from treatment programs, often taking shelter in homeless encampments. After leaving one program in Downey, he walked 50 miles to Glendora, where he was hospitalized for a week due to renal failure from extreme dehydration.
Curtiss says her son has been arrested multiple times for non-violent offenses, with the exception of two. Once as a juvenile and then as an adult, he was taken into custody for battery against her. She told police he had, among other acts of violence, slapped and choked her.
Dating back to middle school, he’d been prescribed an array of psychopharmaceuticals but mostly stuck to weed, which he started smoking at 12, eventually moving on to meth and ketamine as he got older.
For these reasons and dozens of others, Curtiss, who is a nurse, says she became convinced that the only way her son could be saved was if he was placed under an involuntary mental health conservatorship, giving her access to his records and control of his care. She believed he surely met the requirements because he was gravely disabled, a potential danger to himself and others.
But if her son’s troubles weren’t painful enough to face, she would now be forced to confront a mental health system that left no statutory pathway for a despondent mother or other loved one to obtain the kind of highly restrictive court-ordered conservatorship she was seeking.
Currently, under state law, only a physician in a hospital can initiate that process, which requires strong communication between public and private medical providers and a willingness by hospitals, insurers and doctors to take action—all of which are in short supply.
As homelessness rises among severely mentally ill individuals, she found herself at ground zero in a growing debate in California over whether restrictions for such measures should be loosened to confront the new realities on the street or kept strict to guard against potential violations of an individual’s rights.
“The system is designed for people to give up,” says Curtiss, adding that the only way to make it work for her and other similarly situated families is through the kind of sheer will she would need to summon in her two-year effort.
“I knew my son needed a conservatorship early on,” she says, “but I was continuously told that he was not ‘sick’ enough or that he hadn’t been in the hospital enough. What a travesty it is to know that your son is so very ill and so very lost and be told he’s not sick enough.”
Despite wide acknowledgement of the conservatorship system’s shortcomings in addressing rising mental illness among the unhoused, recent legislative efforts to reform the 56-year-old law that governs mental health conservatorships have failed.
Strong pushback over the years has come from those who fear the state could regress to the era before 1967, when tens of thousands of people were locked away in state psychiatric hospitals—heavily medicated, subjected to experiments and stripped of their rights and freedom.
“Conservatorship is the most extreme form of deprivation of civil liberties, aside from the death penalty,” Susan Mizner, director of disability rights for the American Civil Liberties Union, said recently.
Reform advocates, meanwhile, say that as homelessness has reached crisis levels and the public regularly encounters severely mentally ill people on the street, the question they ask is: Why is no one doing anything?
“It’s the question we’re all asking,” says Jessica Cruz, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, which supports reforming conservatorship requirements to make them less restrictive.
The kind of conservatorship Curtiss was seeking was created under the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, or LPS, which was passed in 1967. It is reserved specifically for people with diagnosed mental health disorders, usually schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
The law authorizes only hospitals and in-patient physicians to petition a county to obtain one—a statutory precaution against individuals being unnecessarily committed to locked-down mental health facilities. But records show that such measures are rarely sought.
Although 1,200 unhoused people in Long Beach said they suffered from severe mental illness during the 2023 homeless count, Long Beach hospitals sought only 20 LPS conservatorships in fiscal year 2021-2022, according to Los Angeles County data.
Long Beach Memorial sought one, while St. Mary Medical Center didn’t seek any. College Hospital, which has a contract with LA County to provide mental health services, sought 10, and the VA Hospital in Long Beach sought nine.
In that same 12-month span, a total of 388 LPS conservatorships were sought by general acute care hospitals overall in Los Angeles County, and the majority came from public hospitals run by the county, none of which are in Long Beach. Jails, courts, state hospitals and other specialized psychiatric facilities recommended 354 conservatorships to the county.
Of the total of 742 that were referred for LPS conservatorships, 700 were pursued by the county, records show. Of those, more than half, or 450 people, were placed into conservatorships, with the courts naming the county as the conservator for 284 people, and assigning private conservators, such as family members, for the rest.
These court-ordered arrangements can be denied for a number of reasons, which include physicians not showing up to court to testify, or the person being able to prove to a judge they are not gravely disabled.
Connie Drexler, the county’s deputy public guardian, cited one case in which an unhoused man successfully argued that he was able to care for himself because he had a tent on Skid Row and that he could get food from a nonprofit.
“It may not be your or my first choice, but he had a plan for food, shelter and clothing, and the judge said that was acceptable,” she says.
The turning point—the boiling point—for Curtiss in getting an LPS conservatorship for her son came in 2019.
By then, she had compiled a 10-page chronicle of his deteriorating mental health in all its manifestations, from his 5150 psychiatric holds to his brushes with the law to his turbulent relationship with his mother. She had to piece together some of his medical odyssey after he turned 18 because she could not directly access his records. (At Curtiss’ request, the Post agreed to withhold her son’s name to protect his privacy.)
Her “declaration in support of conservatorship” was intended to demonstrate that action was needed immediately, given his long history of life-threatening—and worsening—mental health crises.
“I have received NUMEROUS telephone calls from concerned police officers, security and members of the public whom he reaches out for help,” she wrote, detailing incidents in which he had been beaten bloody on the street, become lost after aimlessly riding trains and buses and plagued by paranoid fantasies of being tracked by “The Cartel,” among others.
She recounted one frightening incident while he was still in middle school.
One morning, he rode his bike to his former campus—where he’d experienced bullying—instead of his current one. There, he was arrested when staff discovered a Bowie-style knife in his backpack. His mother says he was placed in a juvenile diversion program.
Curtiss wrote that she agreed to a recommendation that her middle-schooler be given medication for a diagnosis of ADHD. His grades improved a bit, she said, but that didn’t last. Soon, he was getting busted at school and by police for having marijuana pipes and other paraphernalia.
His troubles mounted even as he played football at Poly High, then at Wilson, with dreams of someday suiting up for Notre Dame. Curtiss enrolled him in multiple diversion and treatment programs, and doctors prescribed an array of medications, including Seroquel, Trazodone, Prozac, Haldol and Abilify.
As his illicit drug use escalated in his late teens, he began “to be motivated by some unknown internal stimulus to suddenly need to leave,” his mother wrote. “It is now so bad that he can not stay in any one place for greater than a few hours before this sensation drives him to leave.”
At 18, he was taken to Orange County’s St. Jude Hospital by Fullerton police after threatening suicide in a call to his mother, with whom he was no longer living. When Curtiss arrived at St. Jude, her son was rocking back and forth, holding his head in his hands, shouting “turn the cameras off.”
He was placed on a short-term involuntary hold—one of many over the years—before being transferred to College Hospital in Long Beach and then to a Kaiser outpatient psychiatric program. It was there that he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and acute psychosis. He continued to spiral out of control.
In 2019, with her son now 20, Curtiss was at wit’s end. She took her 10-page litany of trauma to the Los Angeles County Probate Court and applied for a conservatorship that did not need to be initiated by a doctor in a medical facility, like an LPS conservatorship.
Probate conservatorships can be requested by family members or concerned caregivers. They’re typically sought for older adults with debilitating conditions such as dementia and, thus, are usually permanent.
LPS conservatorships are reviewed annually with the goal of giving a person back their autonomy.
The probate court appointed an attorney to represent the interests of Curtiss’ son in the proceeding, a breakthrough for his mom, who had filed her document in the court record.
With the history supplied by Curtiss, the attorney assigned to the case prevailed upon a psychiatrist at Del Amo behavioral health hospital in Torrance, where Curtiss’ son was then being treated, to sign a “capacity declaration” stating that the patient was unable to provide informed consent for his medical care because of his impaired mental functions.
“Patient in the past will have periods of stability,” the treating psychiatrist wrote, “but frequently decompensates due various factors leading to behaviors that complicate his existing condition of schizophrenia.”
Ultimately, Curtiss’ probate court request was rejected when the court ruled that the son’s schizophrenia diagnosis would specifically require an LPS conservatorship initiated by a doctor.
But with the psychiatrist’s declaration in hand, Curtiss was able to persuade the Torrance hospital to begin the LPS process, which was completed just months later and named her as the conservator of her son’s affairs. She placed him in a locked facility in Long Beach.
“The conservatorship is the ONLY way I’ve been able to help him, the only way I have been able to participate in his care, advocate for him, develop a care plan for him,” Curtiss wrote in a recent email to the Post, adding: “I had to keep pressing everyone to do something. I couldn’t let up.”
As Curtiss’ experience illustrates, the hurdles to obtain LPS conservatorships remain high. Beyond questions of rights and freedoms, advocates contend that hospitals and physicians are disincentivized to participate for other reasons, including money.
The state’s insurance provider, Medi-Cal, pays hospitals the highest rate for providing acute care, when a patient is facing an emergency. Reimbursement rates are nearly cut in half if a patient is stabilized but waiting for a bed somewhere else or waiting for the conservatorship process to be finalized.
In Curtiss’ case, this took several months. Throughout that period, her son was kept in the emergency room at Del Amo hospital without access to activities or personal items. Curtiss says she shuttled back and forth between her nursing shifts to bring him fresh clothes and other necessities.
“He was miserable,” she says. “He was begging me to take him home.”
Hospitals readily acknowledge there simply aren’t enough alternative places, like subacute facilities, for patients like Curtiss’ son to go, says Sheree Lowe, vice president of the California Hospital Association, a trade and advocacy group.
According to a 2022 RAND study, Los Angeles County has just 5.2 subacute psychiatric beds per 100,000 residents, the lowest rate in the state. To meet the existing need, that number should be 24.6, according to the study.
Gov. Gavin Newsom in March proposed a 2024 bond measure to raise an estimated $1 billion annually for thousands of new mental health beds, from subacute to residential.
“It’s unacceptable what we’re dealing with, at scale, in the state of California,” the governor said at a media event.
Waiting for the courts to act, combined with this shortage of subacute options, means patients awaiting possible conservatorships are often discharged back to the street once they’re stabilized.
What’s more, such crucial decisions might be made without the benefit of knowing a patient’s full medical history because of inadequate communication between hospitals where an individual may have been earlier treated. They might not know, for example, such basic information as whether this is a patient’s first or 10th psychiatric hold or any previous attempts at outpatient treatment.
It’s advantageous when a patient is treated at the same facility multiple times so physicians have at least some history, says Lowe of the hospital association, noting patient privacy laws are very strict about sharing medical data.
“There’s really no way around that,” she says.
Curtiss and many others have lobbied hard for changes to the law that governs LPS conservatorships, including recent efforts to loosen the standard of who qualifies.
A state bill introduced in March would expand the criteria to include any condition that causes an individual to be “at risk for serious harm” due to a mental illness or a substance use disorder—a new category of illness that could be taken into account for LPS conservatorships.
Although a similar measure failed in 2022, state Sen. Susan Talamantes Eggman, D-Stockton, who has authored several bills over the past five years to change mental health law, says the increasingly visible toll of mental health and homelessness could open a window for this one to succeed.
“Decades have passed and we’re still operating on laws that were a good idea at one point in our history, but are now obsolete and a barrier to protect vulnerable people,” she says.
The 1967 Lanterman-Petris-Short Act came in the wake of a public outcry over the conditions of state psychiatric hospitals, where tens of thousands of patients were held indefinitely and subjected to horrific treatment, such as electric shock therapy and lobotomies.
The legislation, signed by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, effectively shut down all but five state mental hospitals. But funding for a new community-based approach did not materialize.
Today, the state’s five state mental hospitals, including Metropolitan in Norwalk, have a total of 6,078 beds, compared to more than 50,000 beds in the 1950s. Of those, only 617 are occupied by LPS conservatees. The remaining 90% are occupied by those with mental illness who are accused of committing crimes or have been convicted of them.
A February staff report for the county’s Board of Supervisors said the wait time for transferring an LPS conservatee to a state hospital last year was 394 days. The wait time for a specialized or subacute care facility, meanwhile, was 141 days.
Despite the intent of the LPS Act, one of the original authors, Sen. Nicholas C. Petris, said in a 1989 interview that mistakes were made: “In this overemphasis to get away from this tyrannical and oppressive system … of incarcerating people so easily, we went overboard the other way.”
The act made it extremely difficult to hold someone against their will longer than 72 hours. As a result, short-term holds in California have risen from about 75,000 annually in 1980 to about 125,000 in 2018. At the same time, conservatorships have plummeted from about 12,000 in 1980 to 6,000 statewide.
Officials are hopeful that the governor’s new CARE Court model will fill the gap between 72-hour psychiatric holds and conservatorships. These courts would function more like a social service agency than a legal venue. Some are scheduled to start in December, including in Los Angeles and Orange counties.
Families, nurses, social workers, police and other concerned parties would be able to directly petition the CARE courts to enroll someone in the program, in which regular appearances would be required and services, including housing, would be provided. Participation would be voluntary, unlike the more restrictive LPS conservatorships.
If individuals refuse or fail to complete CARE Court requirements, they could then be referred for an LPS conservatorship.
Curtiss, who has supported the CARE Court concept, says she’s hopeful it will provide another option for families desperate to help loved ones. But she’s skeptical about LA County’s ability to provide the promised services that will be crucial to its success. Just getting the key players in her son’s conservatorship case to communicate with her has been a challenge, she says.
In fact, at her son’s most recent conservatorship hearing in February, Curtiss celebrated a big win for a woman who for years has camped out in administrative offices and pestered politicians on behalf of her son: Her lawyer persuaded a judge to order LA County and Kaiser to work with her to devise a discharge plan—including housing and care—once her son’s conservatorship ends.
“I know the end is coming,” she says. “It’s just a matter of time.”
Asked what would be a best-case scenario for her son, she struggles for an answer. She would love for him to be somewhere structured, where he can feel supported but also develop some autonomy.
“My hope,” she says, “is that someday he can advocate for himself.”
She says she also hopes for a sea-change in a system that should not require those with severe mental illnesses to endure so much trauma before they can get help.
This story was edited by special projects editor Joel Sappell.
Photography by Thomas R. Cordova, with submitted art from Danielle Curtiss.
Video by Cheantay Jensen.
Full Article & Source:
‘The system is designed for people to give up’
by Elizabeth Ireland
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| Sen. Susan Talamantes Eggman announced behavioral health legislation in March with several mayors of the state’s largest cities. Photo via @emily_hoeven Twitter |
Authored by Sen. Susan Talamantes Eggman, D-Stockton, the legislation would update California’s conservatorship laws to help those suffering from severe mental illness get the help and care they need.
The number of people with untreated severe mental illness in our communities is unacceptable.
— San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria (@MayorToddGloria) April 25, 2023
We all see it — and we need changes now.
That’s why @CABigCityMayors are sponsoring @SenSusanEggman's conservatorship reform bill #SB43, to get people the care they need. #ForAllofUs pic.twitter.com/s3xe8kCkg3
SB 43 would expand the definition of “gravely disabled” in conservatorship law, allowing consideration of a person’s inability to attend to their necessary personal or medical care. It would also update conservatorship laws to include substance-use disorder as a factor in addition to mental illness.
Gloria, chair of the bipartisan coalition of mayors of California’s 13 most populous cities, served as the lead witness in support of the behavioral health reform.
“Today, we took an important step toward reforming California’s inadequate conservatorship laws to ensure people suffering from severe mental illness and addiction issues can get the care they need,” Gloria said.
“All Californians have seen the need for this reform in their communities — whether among our unhoused population or families struggling to get care for a severely ill loved one,” he said. “By passing Sen. Susan Eggman’s Senate Bill 43, the Senate’s Judiciary Committee has advanced a truly significant behavioral health policy reform and given these folks hope.”
“California’s mayors are on the frontlines of the state’s
homelessness and mental health crises, and we need tools like
conservatorship to help our most vulnerable residents. We are excited to
continue to work on this bill on behalf of the families and people who
desperately need and deserve mental health care,” Gloria added.
Full Article & Source:
‘An Important Step’: State Senate Advances Legislation to Reform Conservatorship Laws
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Auburn Rehabilitation and Nursing Center. Kevin Rivoli, The Citizen |
The New York State Department of Health is investigating a video that appears to show a nurse asleep while standing and working at Auburn Rehabilitation and Nursing Center on Sunday.
Jeffrey Hammond, the department's deputy director of communications, confirmed the investigation to The Citizen on Wednesday.
"The (department) has made it a top priority to hold nursing homes accountable for the quality of care they provide," he said.
Hammond declined further comment due to the investigation being open. But he encouraged nursing home residents and their families to share complaints or concerns with the department's Centralized Complaint Intake Unit at health.ny.gov/facilities/nursing/complaints.htm or 1-888-201-4563. Complaints are kept confidential, and the outcomes of reviews are shared with complainants.
According to state Department of Health records, the nursing home was the subject of 62 complaints between Feb. 1, 2019, and Jan. 31 of this year. It had 75 complaints and 10.9 citations per 100 occupied beds, compared to the state averages of 49.9 and 2.6, respectively. The nursing home was fined $17,000 last July for allowing two staff unvaccinated against COVID-19 to work there.
The 92-bed nursing home at 85 Thornton Ave. is also continuing its own investigation into the video, Administrator Judson MacCaull told The Citizen on Wednesday. He declined comment on the current employment status of the nurse depicted in it. He also said the certified nursing assistant who recorded and posted the video on Facebook, Alexxis McNeil, is still employed by the nursing home.
"Once the investigation is complete and we have an opportunity to carefully consider the findings, we will make personnel decisions in accordance with the law and consistent with our commitment to the health and safety of our residents and staff," MacCaull said. "We appreciate your understanding of the need for a fair and complete review and to avoid premature speculation or rushes to judgment."
McNeil, however, told The Citizen she was informed by the nursing home's human resources department that sharing the video publicly violated HIPAA, the federal law restricting the release of medical information. Upon being told she would be fired as a result, McNeil instead quit, she said. To the best of her knowledge, she is no longer an employee of the nursing home.
McNeil's video, which she posted Tuesday morning, has been viewed more than 450,000 times and shared more than 5,700.
Full Article & Source:
State investigating video of sleeping nurse at Auburn nursing home
Supporters say the need for such a panel was made clear in testimony from Arizona victims of probate abuse during committee hearings and is supported by the reports out of the United States General Accountability Office and the Department of Justice, documenting years of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, physical abandonment, and financial exploitation from probate actions.
In explaining his “yes” vote, Rep. Alex Kolodin, an attorney, described that his original reluctance to support the bill was overcome by the testimony of witnesses and the paring of SB1038 with SB1291, which he described as “a very good probate reform bill.”
SB1291 is awaiting final House approval before heading back to the Senate due to amendments in the House.
The bill was the work of Sherry Lund, a nationwide advocate for probate reform, and Senator John Kavanagh-R. On the passage of SB1038 in the Arizona House, Mrs. Lund said, “At a time of such division within our country it is inspiring to see the bipartisan support of this bill which really speaks to the belief in protecting the rights of the people against the status quo. It is not a Democrat issue or a Republican issue, this is a Constitutional rights issue. It was encouraging to see that recognized by the huge majority of members, regardless of party.”
The Probate Advisory Panel, if signed into law, would meet at least
quarterly and report its findings directly to the legislature for
consideration of further reforms to the probate system in Arizona.
Full Article & Source:
Probate Court Reform Bill Passes On Bipartisan Vote In Arizona House
