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Caregiver Neglect
Loren Richards, an 84-year-old Kentucky farmer, spent his last days bedridden and in intense pain. A bowel impaction that went neglected and untreated for several days finally caused a fatal heart attack, after a morning spent screaming for a doctor who never came.
His family didn't know the truth of his terrible demise at the Beverly Health and Rehabilitation nursing home in Frankfort until weeks after he'd been buried. Daughter Jan Richards was at a church service when a man in front of her, who drove the city's handicapped van and had transported local nursing home residents, turned around to offer his condolences. It was so sad, he said, that her father had to die "suffering like that and nothing was done for him."Suffering? Nothing done? Richards, her brother Phil and sister Wanda Delaplane, had been told by the nursing home staff that his passing had been perfunctory. He'd had a history of heart problems and a stroke, after all. They believed his care had been good throughout his five years at the home, although after recent staff cuts, the family had noticed he wasn't always as clean as they'd hoped.
But finding out their father -- one of 11 children born in hardscrabble Appalachia, a man who'd worked his entire life tending his crops and later driving a forklift -- died pleading and screaming to no avail was enough to make them heartbroken. And furious.
They sought answers from the nursing home's staff but learned little. So Delaplane, an assistant attorney general in the state's consumer affairs office, went straight to the state agencies charged with regulating care facilities and asked them to investigate. Two found independently that the nursing home had neglected her dad's condition, and each cited the facility for failure to provide proper care. Among other things, Delaplane learned that 11 of the 13 staff on duty that day were on break at the same time.
Four years later, on May 4, 2006, a seven-week trial ended with a Frankfort jury returning a $20 million verdict against the home. The facility appealed, maintaining that its treatment was appropriate, and agreed to an out-of-court settlement. Delaplane attended the proceedings faithfully. "I had to live my dad's death over each day, but it was worth it," she says. "It was a way of honoring him and having the truth of his death be known."
She also hopes it will help call attention to a growing nationwide problem -- the serious, sometimes fatal neglect of nursing home residents. While many cases become public only through lawsuits, there's compelling evidence that thousands of seniors suffer injury and death each year from preventable causes like malnutrition, dehydration and infected bedsores.
Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, analyzed by the Detroit Free Press, show that these conditions were the combined cause of nearly 14,000 deaths in nursing home patients between 1999 and 2002. And that figure is likely low, since government agencies rely heavily on nursing homes to self-report such incidents. Consider these findings from recent studies:
- In 2003, the National Research Council estimated that one to two million Americans 65 and older were "injured, exploited or otherwise mistreated" by a caretaker.
- Also in 2003, the Government Accountability Office -- the investigative arm of Congress -- released data that showed more than 300,000 nursing home residents live in facilities where they are at "great risk of harm due to woefully deficient care."
- In 2006, a report issued by the University of Kentucky on behalf of the National Committee for the Prevention of Elder Abuse revealed that, in one year alone, adult protective services investigated 461,135 reports nationwide of neglect and abuse (the latter includes physical, sexual and emotional harm) and substantiated 191,908 of them. Of these cases, 26.1 percent were from caregiver neglect.
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