Nursing homes Category Archives — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

June 26, 2020

They’re called ‘nursing’ homes. But what medical care can they really offer?

What’s in a name? The Covid-19 pandemic should force a major change in the big misnomer of long-term care institutions: Let’s stop labeling them with the term nursing — as if they provide significant medical services to the elderly, sick, and injured.

Instead, the coronavirus may lead the public to bust the myth put forward by owners and operators of nursing homes, skilled nursing facilities, assisted living centers, and other similar centers about how they treat some of the nation’s most vulnerable people, especially based on growing evidence amassing in news reports.

The care facilities knew they were not hospitals, with extensive equipment and highly trained doctors and nurses. The facilities found they often were sorely lacking gear — especially personal protective equipment. They too many times did not have the staff with the skills or training to treat already fragile residents infected with the novel coronavirus or recuperating from significant bouts with a debilitating illness. They did not have the Covid-19 tests they needed. They struggled to isolate the infected.

June 14, 2020

Why does lethal bungling persist in fixing the Covid-19 nursing-home mess?

by Patrick A. Malone

Hundreds of thousands of institutionalized Americans have been infected with the novel coronavirus. Tens of thousands of them are dead. Yet a lethal bungling persists in the response to Covid-19’s savaging of residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. Why?

Their owners and operators agree with medical scientists that significantly more testing is required, urgently, so the sick can be diagnosed, treated, and isolated.

But insurers and owners are bickering over who should pay for Covid-19 tests, notably for institutions’ staffers — many of whom are themselves getting sick and dying. As the New York Times reported:

June 9, 2020

U.S. data show Covid-19’s terrible and unrelenting toll on nursing homes

by Patrick A. Malone

Federal regulators have issued, at long last, the data they have collected on the novel coronavirus’ effect on nursing homes, giving an incomplete but still devastating look at how in just a few months some of the nation’s most vulnerable people have been savaged by Covid-19.

With 12% of the nation’s nursing 15,000 homes yet to report, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has tallied “25,923 resident deaths tied to Covid-19 … and 449 deaths among the facilities’ staff. The [U.S.] survey also found about 95,000 infection cases at nursing homes across 49 states, about a third of them among staff members,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

The newspaper finds that figure far too low, noting:

May 31, 2020

Nursing homes, Covid-19 hot spots now, resisted emergency planning rules

by Patrick A. Malone

With hurricanes, wildfires and other calamities, authorities pound home to the public the importance of preparedness. So why should preparing for an infection outbreak be any different? Yet more disclosures have raised disturbing questions about the dearth of crucial emergency planning by nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, their owners and operators, and federal and state regulators.

Taxpayers likely will foot hefty bills — a new estimate says it may be $15 billion —in the days ahead for facilities’ active resistance to oversight and forward thinking. These lapses played a part in the terrible toll in failing to safeguard the old, sick, and injured, and first responders and health care workers, too, reported ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative site.

It cites data from AARP about the nationwide deaths in long-term care centers inflicted by the novel coronavirus:

May 25, 2020

Human fault or act of nature in coronavirus’s deadly assault on nursing homes?

by Patrick A. Malone

Is the coronavirus’s staggering toll on patients in nursing homes something to be written off as a force of nature for which humans bear little fault? Or are there lessons to be learned about shortcomings that could help preserve lives the next time?

News media reports keep unearthing institutional misery and a blindness to the suffering of the aged, chronically ill, and seriously injured. Bad luck, shrug facility owners and operators, seemingly joined in by regulators and some politicians. Couldn’t be helped. Did the best we could.

In fact, investigations — by journalists and watchdogs — have shown the toll taken by nursing homes’ sloppy disregard for infection control, press for profits, and unacceptable paralysis as situations headed south.

May 20, 2020

Virus may upend hospitals’ finances, but not dubious Big Pharma behavior

by Patrick A. Malone

When it comes to aggravating parties in the U.S. health care system, a certain French phrase captures an uncomfortable reality: “Plus ça change” — as in plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose or “The more it changes, the more it stays the same.”

We can see that here:

Big Pharma, even in the midst of a pandemic, knows how to play politics, maximize its profits, and challenge regulators to the max while doing so.

May 17, 2020

As nursing home toll rises, many U.S. and state responses fall to new lows

by Patrick A. Malone

Federal and state officials almost seem as if they are competing with each other to race to new lows in their wrong-headed failure to protect elderly, sick, and injured Americans who require institutional care and whose health and lives are being savaged by the novel coronavirus.

An estimated 1.5 million Americans live in long-term institutions, including nursing homes, assisted living centers, skilled nursing facilities, memory care hospitals and the like. Covid-19 has taken a terrible toll on these frail, chronically ill, or seriously injured and debilitated people with more than 27,000 residents and staff dying from the novel coronavirus — roughly a third of all the disease fatalities nationwide. A third of the coronavirus deaths in the District of Columbia have been in skilled nursing facilities, while 40% of the Covid-19 deaths in California, the nation’s largest state, have been in nursing homes.

In the latest baffling response, President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence both suddenly have “recommended” that states get nursing homes and other similar facilities to step up the testing of residents and staff. They did not make this common-sense step mandatory, nor did they offer any word on how the federal government could help achieve this. As the Associated Press reported:

May 10, 2020

Nursing homes across region failed to protect residents from Covid-19’s toll

by Patrick A. Malone

With nursing home operators bleating up a storm of weak defenses and denials, soaring Covid-19 infections and deaths have laid siege to far too many long-term care facilities in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. The consequences have been dire.

In Maryland, the Baltimore Sun reported:

“Nearly three-fifths of Marylanders killed by the coronavirus are residents of long-term care facilities, according to [a recent state] update of nursing home data …The Maryland Department of Health reported that 793 of the state’s 1,338 victims, almost 60%, were residents of nursing homes, rehabilitation facilities and similar long-term care facilities. An additional 11 deaths were staff members of those facilities, with more than one of every five of Maryland’s confirmed infections being a resident or staff member of congregate living facilities.”

May 3, 2020

Politicians seek a 100% immunity in coronavirus — from lawsuits seeking justice

by Patrick A. Malone

It’s a little hard to fathom but actions speak louder than words: For political partisans, what seems to be scarier than a novel coronavirus that has infected more than 1 million Americans and claimed more lives in a few weeks than years of U.S. involvement in Vietnam?

Trial lawyers. Like me. Really?

Politico, the news web site, reported that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy have grown adamant that “any” legislation Congress considers in the days ahead involving Covid-19 must shield an array of business interests from liability from “frivolous” lawsuits. Politico quoted him, thusly:

April 28, 2020

It’s past time for full disclosure about the Covid-19 nursing home nightmares

by Patrick A. Malone

When hundreds of thousands of Americans are getting infected with Covid-19 and tens of thousands of die from it, regulatory incrementalism in protecting some of the most vulnerable is simply unacceptable: The latest halting measures by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services do a disservice to the elderly, injured, and sick residents nationwide in nursing homes, long-term care centers, and skilled nursing facilities.

Seema Verma, the agency’s director, has told these institutions that they now must inform residents and their loved ones about Covid-19 infections and deaths in the care facilities, whether the affected individuals are staff members or others housed in the centers.

She only started, however, to respond to coast-to-coast wails about the official silence that has enshrouded the novel coronavirus’ toll on institutional care, with facilities condemned in increasing fashion by critics as infection petri dishes, or as one politician deemed them, “death pits.”