Ohio's secret shame: Abuse
and neglect
By Debra Jasper and Spencer Hunt
Troubled homes
The state threatened to close these 65
institutions for the mentally retarded between January 1999 and
August 2001.
These 72 institutions and nursing homes passed
at least three annual Health Department inspections since January
1999 without a single citation.
Problems were so bad at 65 institutions and
nursing homes in the past three years that the state Health
Department threatened to withhold their federal Medicaid money.
Unlike county abuse and neglect reports, state inspection reports
are public.
Those facilities were cited 1,301 times for
more than 2,900 incidents related to poor care, an Enquirer database
compiled from Health Department inspection records shows.
The database shows 524 incidents of abuse and
neglect ranging from cruel language to sodomy. There were 590
injuries, from minor bruises to skull fractures, and 205 incidents
in which people either weren't given their medicine or were given
the wrong doses.
Two of the most troubled nursing homes were in
Greater Cincinnati.
Inspectors found so many problems at
Fairfield Center in Butler County that they threatened three
times since 1997 to decertify the 119-bed facility, one of the
largest private nursing homes for the mentally retarded in Ohio.
Inspectors repeatedly cited Fairfield Center
for giving people nothing to do, inadequate medical care and
insufficient staff and training.
One inspection found that workers didn't know a
resident had pneumonia. Despite the resident's "cracked, dry lips,"
workers didn't offer the person anything to drink for more than five
hours.
Nor did workers respect people's dignity or
privacy - a problem cited in case after case across Ohio. At
Fairfield Center, some people didn't have toothbrushes. They
bathed in rusted showers and lived in rooms with soiled walls, torn
bedding and broken furniture.
Officials responded by retraining staff, buying
new furniture and painting walls.
At Brookside Extended Care Center in
neighboring Warren County, inspectors found that a staff person left
a woman upside down, alone in a tub, where she was discovered
choking and gagging.
Another inspection found that workers bathed 18
people and then put them in a hallway with wet hair near open doors
in 30-45 degree weather.
Workers at the same facility had been told that
during fire drills they should attach red ribbons to rooms once they
were evacuated. After one fire drill, workers had attached red
ribbons to nine rooms with 27 people inside.
Brookside officials assured the state
they conducted more fire drills and trained staff to better monitor
people, dry their hair and dress them more appropriately.
Fairfield Center and Brookside are run by
ViaQuest Inc., which also operates seven other nursing homes for
the mentally retarded in Ohio. Five of the company's homes were
threatened with loss of funding seven times in the past three years.
During that time, the government paid ViaQuest $86 million to care
for about 375 people.
Janet Pell, vice president of operations for
ViaQuest, acknowledges that things were so bad at some facilities in
the late '90s that "we were unfortunately relying on feedback from
regulators, so we were moving from fire to fire."
She and Richard Johnson, president of ViaQuest,
say conditions have vastly improved in the past year.
The company has added layers of management,
raised staff salaries from $7 to more than $10 an hour and reduced
turnover at Fairfield Center from as high as 100 percent to
less than 40 percent a year.
"Clearly we're not where we want to be. But we
recognize the issues, and we're working very hard," Mr. Johnson
says.
Helen Rothert, 77, knows first-hand about the
problems inside Fairfield Center. Her 51-year-old son Dale,
who is severely mentally retarded and has never spoken or even
cried, has lived there for 16 years.
A few months ago, Ms. Rothert found cuts on
Dale's knees when she took him home to her Green Township condo for
the weekend. Another time, she bought him a quilt to brighten his
room and somone took it off his bed.
When she found it later, the quilt was covered
with feces.
"It's unbelievable," she says. "They can't seem
to train the staff."
Last month, Ms. Rothert went to pick up Dale
and found him curled up in a corner recliner while other residents
wandered the halls alone or sat slumped in their wheelchairs,
staring down an empty corridor. She stopped by Dale's bedroom,
picked up a pad off his urine-soaked, unmade bed and shook her head
in frustration.
Ms. Rothert and her husband cared for Dale at
home for more than 30 years. But after her husband's open-heart
surgery, they felt they could no longer take the strain and
reluctantly agreed to allow their son to move. It was a
heartbreaking decision.
"I just worry about him all the time," she
says.
Despite the problems, Ms. Rothert believes
Fairfield Center is better for her son than a less-regulated
group home or apartment. At least she can keep close watch over him
there.
She kisses her son and pats his face. "As long
as I'm around," she says, "I'm going to keep fighting."
|
