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| Eagle Crest nursing home |
A large Carmichael nursing home that was targeted for years by government regulators for poor quality care has decided to voluntarily close after state inspectors determined that a female resident was sexually abused multiple times by another resident at the facility.
For 37 months, the Eagle Crest nursing home, formerly known as Carmichael Care & Rehabilitation Center, was on the federal government’s consumer-beware list of troubled facilities. Other facilities nationwide came and went from the list, but Eagle Crest remained, supposedly operating under stepped-up scrutiny intended to nudge it back into compliance.
In June, the state had had enough.
Documents obtained late Friday from the California Department of Public Health show that the state recommended this summer that federal regulators drop the facility from its Medicare provider rolls, a drastic action that strips a nursing home of its critical government funding.
Instead, the nursing home’s owner acted first.
In a business move that will
upend the daily lives of dozens of patients and their families – and
significantly reduce the number of skilled nursing beds in the
Sacramento region – Pennsylvania-based Genesis HealthCare Inc. recently
notified the state it would voluntarily close Eagle Crest in October.
The company took issue with
the state, though, noting that the 126-bed facility had self-reported
the allegation of sexual abuse in February. The company disputed the
state’s findings that an “immediate jeopardy” citation was warranted or
even that the facility was out of compliance at all.
A finding of immediate
jeopardy, known as an IJ, is a heart-stopper for nursing home operators
and can carry among the steepest penalties. Immediate jeopardy is called
when a provider’s noncompliance has caused, or is likely to cause,
serious harm or death to a resident.
In its investigation, the
state found that the female patient, who had Alzheimer’s disease, had
been fondled, kissed and abused by a male resident who was known to be a
risk for inappropriate sexual behaviors and had a “history of
inappropriate touching of a confused patient,” state documents show.
Even so, the male resident, who the state report described as
“cognitively intact,” was not receiving one-on-one monitoring, the
report says.
The facility’s failure to safeguard the woman had placed all 36 female residents at risk for sexual abuse, the state found.
The facility had
self-reported to the state that the man had been found in February in
the woman’s room, pulling up his pants while she lay fully undressed in
her bed, documents show.
On June 22, the state
notified Eagle Crest administrator Harumi Hurrianko it was recommending
that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services terminate its
provider agreement. A month later, a lawyer for Genesis notified the
state it would voluntarily close, calling the immediate jeopardy
citation the “straw that brings us to make this difficult decision.”
The closure of one of the
region’s largest skilled nursing facilities startled elder care
advocates this week. They say they are worried about the loss of beds
and the stress placed on vulnerable residents suddenly being forced to
relocate, possibly out of the county. The single-story beige building is
located along a busy stretch of Fair Oaks Boulevard, about a mile west
of the boundary between Carmichael and Fair Oaks.
Over the years, Eagle Crest
has had its share of notoriety, including a rash of state citations and
fines, numerous federal deficiencies and generally poor ratings. Some
recent inspection reports show the facility has been written up and
penalized for inadequately treating or preventing bed sores, failing to
self-report possible abuse and not attempting CPR on a resident who
wished to be resuscitated.
But none of the health care
advocates contacted by The Bee late this week was aware of the sexual
abuse allegations that preceded the company’s decision to close.
“This really caught us
off-guard,” said California’s long-term care ombudsman, Joe Rodrigues,
reacting to the closure news. He noted that the local ombudman’s office
first learned about the company’s closure plans around mid-August.
“This is going to have a big
impact; it’s such a large facility,” Rodrigues said. “Where are we
going to find homes for these people? And why are they closing this
facility in the first place?”
A spokeswoman for Genesis
Healthcare, Jeanne Moore, would not say why the facility was closing.
But Moore offered assurances in an email that the facility is
coordinating the closure with the California Department of Public Heath
and “will comply with the requirements for closing a nursing center.”
Closure will be around Oct. 20, she said.
“We will continue our
day-to-day care and operations during this process until our last
patient or resident is transferred and the center is closed,” she
stated. “We will take all reasonable precautions to eliminate or reduce
any negative effects that may result from the transfer.”
She specifically cited three
other facilities owned by Genesis in Northern California that could
take residents from Eagle Crest: American River Care Center in
Carmichael, Creekside Center in Stockton and Willows Center in Willows.
Two of those facilities have
had their own alleged quality issues, with both American River and
Willows Center receiving “below-average” ratings in an ongoing
statistical analysis of California nursing homes by the University of
California, San Francisco. The database, which examines numerous aspects
of facilities from staffing ratios to complaints to deficiency trends,
was created to help consumers make long-term care choices.
Eagle Crest currently has an
overall “poor” rating, while Creekside Center was deemed “superior” in
the ratings available on the
CalQualityCare.org website.
Of the 59 nursing homes in
the four-county region, only 15, or about a quarter, have more licensed
beds than Eagle Crest. Genesis informed the California Employment
Development Department that 72 jobs also would be lost in the closure.
A spokeswoman for the
California Department of Public Health, which licenses and inspects
nursing homes, said the state approved the closure and relocation plan
on Aug. 4.
Under California law, if 10
or more residents are likely to be moved due to a change in a nursing
home’s operation, the facility must submit a proposed relocation plan to
the state and cannot proceed until it’s approved. Whenever homes close,
advocates worry about possible “transfer trauma,” in which the upheaval
and separation from family, friends and known caregivers can cause
serious harm and even death to fragile residents.
“People who live in nursing
homes are extremely vulnerable,” said Michael Connors of California
Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, based in San Francisco. “Separating
them from everyone and everything they care about is cruel and
traumatic.”
Transfer trauma has become a
hot topic in California. Outrage erupted last year in Humboldt County
over the prospect of widespread transfer trauma when the state’s largest
nursing home owner, Shlomo Rechnitz of Los Angeles, threatened to close
three of his facilities in the remote region. Before Rechnitz
significantly modified his plan, some patients were facing the
possibility of moving hundreds of miles away.
As a result, Assemblymen Jim
Wood, D-Healdsburg, introduced a bill that would increase the amount of
advance warning that residents and others receive prior to a nursing
home closure. AB 275 was signed by the governor on Friday.
Even before the Eagle Crest
shutdown, the Genesis chain of nursing homes had been facing widespread
regulatory and public-relations problems.
In June, the U.S. Department
of Justice announced that Genesis HealthCare Inc. would pay the
government nearly $54 million to settle six federal lawsuits. The
government alleged that companies and facilities acquired by Genesis had
submitted false claims to government health care programs for medically
unnecessary services, and “grossly substandard nursing care.”
A 2014 Bee investigation
found that nursing homes operated in California by Genesis HealthCare
received complaints of abuse at seven times the statewide average. The
company is headquartered in Kennett Square, Pa.
The closure of Eagle Crest
illustrates the difficulty regulators have in pushing operators to make
improvements amid accusations of substandard care – even when they are
publicly shamed by government inspectors.
Eagle Crest spent more than
three years on the “Special Focus Facility List” maintained by the U.S.
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The list is a kind of
improve-or-else warning program aimed at getting operators to correct
serious problems, or lose their ability to collect government funding.
Special Focus Facilities are
surveyed more frequently and, if problems persist, are subject to
possible fines and other penalties, including termination from the
Medicare and Medicaid programs.
On the latest list, updated
Aug. 17, only one nursing home out of 118 nationwide that were publicly
identified had been on the list longer than Eagle Crest.
“It’s a token enforcement
program that’s done a poor job of turning around dangerous nursing
homes,” said elder-care advocate Connors. “The question is, what’s wrong
with the system if the worst of the worst are under all this scrutiny –
then why aren’t they getting better?”
California, with 1,241
licensed skilled nursing facilities, currently has seven nursing homes
on the feds’ consumer-beware list. One, in Fairfield, has “shown
improvement,” the list reveals, while another in Los Angeles is said to
have recently graduated.
The other California homes,
including Eagle Crest, are defined by the government as having “serious
quality issues” and have been assigned to the program to “stimulate
improvements,” according to the government’s web page on its
Special Focus Facility Initiative.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article170894757.html#storylink=cpy
Full Article & Source:
Alzheimer’s patient was sexually abused, state says. Now nursing home says it’s closing
