When long-term care residents needing supervision wander from their facility, death often results. Yesterday, two men were killed after wandering from the Britthaven rest home where they lived. A train struck them on a railroad track in Kannapolis within a mile of the home.
http://www.salisburypost.com/Area/112809-kann-train-kills-two
Britthaven, Inc., is a North Carolina based family owned nursing home chain with homes in North Carolina, Kentucky, and Virginia. One of its homes in Kentucky has been identified as one of the worst nursing homes in the United States. To read more, click on this link: http://www.somerset-kentucky.com/local/local_story_327191030.html
Nationally, falls continue to be a life-ending problem in nursing homes, and state investigators do not adequately investigate them. See this representative story relating to a Minnesota nursing home resident.
The new health care plan being promoted by Democrats provides much needed long term care health insurance. See article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125857767877054273.html
10 million Americans have osteoporosis. 34 million more have osteopenia, 80% of whom are women. Osteopenia can be, but isn’t always, a precursor to osteoporosis. Should you be tested and treated? Click to read more.
The Affordable Health Care For America Act, passed by the US House of Representatives this past Saturday evening contained several provisions extremely beneficial to the elderly, and in particular the elderly who reside in nursing homes. These provisions included:
The Nursing Home Transparency Act;
A requirement that long-term care workers undergo criminal background checks ;
A voluntary payroll deduction system that would provide benefits for long-term care services. The bill, H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, can be downloaded at http://thomas.loc.gov.
The nursing home transparency provisions are particularly significant, requiring:
• Public disclosure of individuals and entities that own, govern, operate, finance, provide services to, and/or control the nation’s nursing homes.
• Compliance and ethics programs and internal quality assurance programs in nursing homes, and pilot projects to test ways to improve oversight of chains.
• Collection and reporting of staffing information based on payroll data, including hours of care per resident day, turnover and retention rates, and facility expenditures for wages and benefits.
• A review of Nursing Home Compare and addition of information about sanctions against facilities and the number of adjudicated crimes occurring in them.
• A categorical breakdown of expenditures on cost reports to show how much facilities spend on direct care versus other expenses.
• An improved state complaint process to help protect complainants against retaliation.
• An increase in federal civil monetary penalties and a process to hold CMPs in escrow during appeals (although only after an independent informal dispute resolution process was completed).
• Adequate notification when facilities decided to close, including the option for the government to continue reimbursement until relocation was achieved.
• Training of nursing assistants in dementia care and abuse prevention.
In the coming weeks, the focus of health care reform will be on the Senate, where Senate leaders are trying to meld bills passed by the Finance (S. 1796) and HELP (S. 1679) committees and to find enough votes to pass the resulting bill. Any bill that passes the Senate will have to be reconciled with H.R. 3962 to create a final health care reform bill to be voted on by both houses. Nursing home transparency and other long-term care provisions will remain at risk of being amended or dropped as this delicate and highly political process goes forward.
Please encourage your Senators to support these provisions of the House bill.
In an excellent opinion written by Judge Ervin, the N.C. Court of Appeal reversed the trial court for dismissing plaintiff’s pierce the veil claim and fraudulent conveyance claim. This opinion should be helpful to nursing home neglect and abuse lawyers, who are frequently confronted with sham entities as the uninsured licensees of North Carolina nursing homes.
Click to Read
Health care fraud affects the elderly. Mariner Health Care and SavaSenior Care, two related Atlanta based nursing home chains, and the men that run them, are being investigated for illegal kickbacks. Click and read.
The elderly among us have wisdom, historical perspective, and spiritual development which enriches our lives. I have long thought to post articles about outstanding senior citizens on this blog, and commence today, in honor of Claude Levi Strauss, world famous anthropologist, who just died at the age of 100, after a lifetime of contributing to our knowledge about ourselves. Click to read his obituary in the New York Times.
A conference is scheduled this weekend in Raleigh at the McKimmon Center to celebrate the spiritual growth that is life’s mission in old age. Click on the link for more information.
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/health_science/story/170752.html