Pennsylvania Nursing Home Abuse Lawyer Blog

On Friday, two remaining residents were evicted from White Owl Manor in Mahanoy City and the doors were padlocked because the owner did not take action on a judge’s order.

According to an article on the RepublicanHerald.com, White Owl Manor operated for many years as a personal care home, but was closed in July 2011 by the state Department of Public Welfare after the deaths of three residents were not reported. At that time, the facility was closed immediately and 32 residents were placed in other homes.

In February, the township filed a “Notice of Zoning Violation,” claiming that the owner was operating a boarding house that was not permitted in the zoning district.

On Thursday, a judge approved the sale of personal property belonging to Saint Catherine Medical Center in Fountain Springs.

According to an article on the RepublicanHerald.com, the building will almost certainly cease to be a hospital as a result of the ruling. This ends the hospital’s 129-year history here in Schuylkill County.

The sale will be at least for 2 days, a Saturday and Monday, in mid-October. Advertising for the auction will begin soon. Only personal property will be sold, not the building itself or the land on which is sits.

A local man is using the power of the web to keep Pleasant Valley Manor Nursing Home in county hands. His decision to take action came about two weeks ago when he read in the Pocono Record that Monroe County Commissioners said that not “one more dollar of tax should go to Pleasant Valley Manor.”

In each of the past two years, $1 million in county taxpayer subsidies have been provided to the 174-bed nonprofit nursing home. Commissioners feel that something must be done to reduce or eliminate losses at the nursing home, and have discussed selling the home to a private, for-profit corportation. A decision on whether to sell the home could be a year away.

If the home goes into private hands, there are fears that a private operator may reduce staff or neglect residents. The majority of residents count on federal and state Medicare and Medicaid payments to pay their bills. But those payments have been reduced, resulting in a loss of about $100 a day per patient.

An attempt to see if financial incentives might improve quality of care at nursing homes had mixed results, according to an article on McKnights.com.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services conducted a pilot program where nursing homes would be rewarded if they met financial savings goals and improved quality of care. The program includes 182 skilled nursing facilities in Wisconsin, New York, and Arizona. Awards were based on how well the facilities achieved finanicial savings through reducing avoidable hospitalizations and if they met clinical measures.

According to the article, the program’s lead investigator, David Grabowski, Ph.D., said the first year’s results were “mixed” with Wisconson getting fairly large savings, Arizona getting modest savings, and New York getting no savings.

On Friday, four long-term care residents received certificates for completing Pennsylvania’s Empowered Expert Residents (PEER) program. The program is designed to empower nursing home residents to speak out about quality-of-life issues.

According to an article on TheTimes-Tribune.com, the training is led by the non-profit group Serviing Seniors Inc., of Lackawanna County. It includes five sessions that stress themes of self-resolution and consumer empowerment. The goal for the program is to have more people feel comfortable enough to speak up about anything that may affect their day-to-day lives.

Serving Seniors has trained 180 people in the PEER program since 2002. Linda Korgeski, ombudsman for the organization, is quoted in the article as saying, “We never want residents accepting the unacceptable.”

Anyone with relatives in the Berwick Retirement Home in Berwick, Columbia County, should take heed to the following article from WNEP.com. A former employee has been charged with stealing $24,600 from residents while she worked at the home. And according to police, that number could grow.

Berwick police said the former employee faces charges of forgery and theft for opening credit cards in residents’ names and cashing their personal checks for more than the amount they asked for, pocketing the difference herself. She worked at the Berwick Retirement Home from February 2011 until June of this year, and was in charge of residents’ accounts. It is also alleged that she took money from the retirement home’s safe.

Police said an internal audit is being done and that the sum of money she took could be more than initially discovered. Her preliminary hearing is scheduled for August 15.

As Pennsylvania’s new Voter ID Law continues to keep people in the state talking, it also brings up a new responsibility for nursing facilities: issuing photo identification to residents if necessary to allow them to vote.

Both the PA Department of Health (DOH) and the PA Department of Public Welfare (DPW) have sent out notices to nursing home operators that they may need to issue photo identification. According to the notice from the DOH, acceptable photo IDs for the purposes of voting includes IDs issued to residents and employees by care facilities, provided the identification includes an expiration date and is not yet expired.

According to an article on JDSupra.com, the Voter ID Law does not have an express requirement that nursing facilities make such identification available, but the notices from DPW and DOH caution these facilities that failure to issue photo IDs to residents may result in a violation. The responsibility may extent to assisted living residences as well.

A new study by the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing has found that high patient loads and high nurse exhaustion rates were associated with an increase in catheter-associated urinary-tract and surgical-site infections among hospital patients.

According to an article on McKnights.com, reducing cather-associated urinary-tract infections remains a top concern among nursing home staff. The study found that urinary-tract-infection rates increased by about one additional infection per 1,000 patients for each additional patient that as added to a nurse’s workload.

Researchers analyzed data from self-reported responses that included emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishment. They identified emotional exhaustion as the key to burnout syndrome.