South Carolina Personal Injury Blog - Neglect

Washington State DSHS and Others Pay $6 Million to Neglected Boy

Will Parker — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:37:18 GMT

Representatives for a neglected and food-deprived little boy reached a $6 million dollar settlement.

Shayne Abegg, a 6 year old who was a skeletal weight of 25 pounds when police rescued him in March 2007, will receive $6 million from the state of Washington and two other defendants in a settlement reached Tuesday.

The state's portion, $5 million, is the largest payment to a child victim ever by the Department of Social and Health Services. The boy's therapist and her employer, a social-service agency, are the two other defendants.

When rescued, the boy was covered in bruises and sores, his temperature had dropped to 87 degrees, and he was unable to sit or stand without assistance. A judge compared his condition to someone in a Nazi concentration camp.

The lawsuit alleged four caseworkers had missed a pattern of abuse and neglect, including reports that the boy was malnourished and had hoarded food.

"This little boy who was neglected by the state for 14 months while they received warning after warning that he was being starved and neglected will now have the resources to take care of himself for the remainder of his life," said the boy's lawyer, David Moody, of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro law firm in Seattle.

The boy's father, Danny Abegg, and his girlfriend, Marilea Mitchell, were sentenced to eight years in prison last year. They were convicted of criminal mistreatment for withholding food from Shayne as punishment.

The lawsuit alleged that the therapist failed to report signs of abuse, despite billing for work for regular visits he allegedly did up until the boy's rescue.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Will Parker

Nursing Home Responds To Abuse Allegations

Chrissie Cole — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 02:06:53 GMT

Following accusations of nursing home abuse and neglect, a Central Illinois nursing home is employing changes and reeducating their staff on the proper policies and procedures.

The state says the abuse occurred in February at, Odd Fellow Rebekah Home, in Matoon. A nurse employed by the nursing home is accused of holding down a resident to give him his medication and threatening another resident with an injection if they didn't take their meds. The nursing home was fined $30,000 for the incident.

Nursing home officials are fully cooperating with the public health department investigation. The nursing home plans to appeal the $30,000 fine.

For more information on this topic, please visit our section on Nursing Home Injuries and Elder Abuse.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Chrissie Cole

Amendment/Retraction to Article Re Life Care Centers of America

Matt Christian — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 15:53:03 GMT

In an earlier blog dated July 31, 2007, and titled "Nursing Home Charged Criminally for Abuse" the statement was made that Life Care Centers of America pled "guilty" to criminal charges. This was an inadvertant typographical error. Life Care Centers of America has pled "not guilty" to these charges. We apologize for any inconvenience or issues this error may have caused.

For more information on this subject matter, please review our section on Medical Malpractice and Negligent Care.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Matt Christian

Nursing Home to Pay $54M For Resident Who Bled to Death

Ric Davis — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 07:17:09 GMT

In the largest personal injury verdict in state history, a New Mexico jury awarded $54 million to the family of a woman who bled to death in her nursing home. The plaintiff's lawyer, Carl Bettinger of Albuquerque, was already well-acquainted with the defendant, having previously litigated more than half a dozen similar negligence trials against Manor Care, a nursing home chain based in Toledo, Ohio. After a two-and-a-half week trial, jurors found Manor Care liable for negligence and attempting to cover up the cause of death of 78-year-old resident Barbara Barber.

Rather than do a better job caring for residents, the trend is for nursing homes to set up shell corporations which have no assets in order to avoid being held financially accountable. In Texas, residents are at an even greater disadvantage as Bush allies have enacted legislation to protect the business interests of negligent Drs and nursing homes at the expense of the rights of the consumers. Their efforts in SC to enact similar legislation have failed.

For more information on this subject matter, please refer to the section on Medical Malpractice.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Ric Davis

Nursing Home's Profits Could Be Used To Prevent Abuse and Neglect

Matt Christian — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 16:41:50 GMT

As many people know, the nursing home chain, Manor Care, was recently purchased for a very large sum of money. The reports indicate that the CEO of Manor Care, Paul Ormond, would receive between $118 and $186 million dollars as a result of the buy-out. Toby S. Edelman of the Center for Medicare Advocacy and the California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform has had an interesting inquiry about what effects this amount of money could have on staffing for better care in nursing homes if it were used to hire nurses and nurse aides

Mr. Edelman figured that "Using federal wage estimates for nursing home workers, we calculated that Manor Care's 278 nursing homes could hire an additional 5346 certified nurse aides or an additional 2198 registered nurses if $118,000,000 were spent on staff (19.2 aides or 7.9 RNs at each Manor Care nursing home). If Mr. Ormond's $186,000,000 windfall were spent on staff, Manor Care could hire an additional 8427 certified nurse aides or an additional 3464 RNs (30.3 CNAs or 12.5 RNs at each Manor Care nursing home)."

When the federal government has estimated that over 90% of nursing homes do not have sufficient staff to care for residents, this is an interesting analysis that continues to show that nursing homes place profits over people.

For more information on this subject matter, please refer to the section on Medical Malpractice and Negligent Care.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Matt Christian

Nursing Home Charged Criminally for Abuse

Matt Christian — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 15:56:15 GMT

Life Care Centers of America pled not guilty this week to charges of manslaughter, abuse and neglect, and filing false Medicare claims. The charges against the Tennessee based chain come in the wake of an investigation in the death of a 74 year-old woman in Massachussetts.

McCauley, a resident confined to a wheelchair at the Life Care Center of Acton, died after wheeling herself out of front door of the facility and down a flight of steps. At the time of her death, McCauley was not wearing an electronic bracelet her doctors had prescribed that would have locked the doors and set off an alarm if she got too close to the entrance. Prosecutors say McCauley would not have died if she had been wearing the bracelet.

For more information on this subject, please refer to our section on Nursing Home and Elder Abuse.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Matt Christian

Nursing Homes Get Rich While the Neglected Suffer

Matt Christian — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 15:56:41 GMT

A major factor in nursing home abuse cases is the fact that many nursing homes are underfunded and understaffed. The nursing homes consistently claim that they do not have the money to fund and appropriately run these homes but recent business trends show otherwise. The Carlyle Group announced yesterday that it is going to purchase Manor Care, a nursing home operator for $6.3 billion.

Manor Care, which traces its roots to a single nursing home in Wheaton 48 years ago, has grown into one of the largest providers of long-term care and services in the country, with nearly 60,000 employees in more than 500 facilities under the Heartland, ManorCare Health Services and Arden Courts brands.

Manor Care CEO stated that this deal "...affords a significant cash premium to our shareholders...." The head of Manor Care's health care team stated that the company is positioned for continued growth and success.

Manor Care was also once one of the nation's largest hotel franchisers, licensing such brands as Comfort Inn, Quality Inn, Clarion Inn, Econo Lodge, Sleep Inn, Rodeway Inn and Friendship Inn through its Choice Hotels International subsidiary, which it spun off in 1996. It later sold its 50 percent stake in Vitalink Pharmacy Services, which provides medications for nursing homes and other institutional buyers.

Clearly, nursing homes such as Manor Care are not suffering from a lack of revenue or funding and are choosing to place their profits over people so that the patients are neglected and suffer but the upper ranks of the company flourish. There is no excuse for the underfunding and understaffing that occurs which harms our elderly.

For more information on this subject, please refer to our section on Nursing Home and Elder Abuse.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Matt Christian

Medical Malpractice Crisis about the Operating Room and the Board Room, Not the Courtroom

Ric Davis — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 06:05:00 GMT

Study after study confirms that the medical malpractice "crisis" has its roots in the operating room, not the courtroom. A study released by HealthGrades, a consumer advocacy group that rates health care providers, found that an astonishing 1.2 million Medicare patients suffered "adverse safety incidents" in American hospitals over the two-year period, 2002-2004. Of those million-plus injured patients, more than 250,000 died preventable deaths, according to HealthGrades. The others were left to recuperate from their injuries, which ranged from unexplained post-operative fractures to surgical foreign objects being left in their bodies.

As if the medical data alone wasn't enough cause for concern, HealthGrades also determined that the financial cost of medical negligence suffered by Medicare patients is staggering. From 2002 to 2004, the taxpayers paid nearly $9.3 billion to cover expenses related to the medical errors HealthGrades uncovered.

With HealthGrades' study as a backdrop, it is incredible that some elected officials are still trying to shield healthcare providers from any liability for the injuries and deaths that they cause. Apparently, a nearly $5 billion annual subsidy from Medicare to cover the costs of botched care isn't enough. Health care providers and their insurance carriers are demanding reforms that amount to blanket immunity.

There is no more vulnerable group of Americans than our elderly population. We must be fervent about protecting the lives and dignity of our elders. A vital tool in the protection of dignity of elderly people, and ensuring that their lives are deemed to have value, is giving them and their representatives the ability to seek redress for the harms that they suffer. But in the commotion surrounding the tort reform debate, the rights of the elderly are often ignored, even though (as HealthGrades showed so vividly), they are among the chief victims of medical negligence.

Rather than trying to prevent injured Medicare patients from coming into our courtrooms, policy makers should focus on ending taxpayer subsidies for substandard care. The 1.2 million Medicare patients who biannually are the victims of medical negligence should know that the pro-life community is standing with them.

In the aftermath of the HealthGrades study, we all have good reason to oppose tort reform proposals that would trample on injured patients' rights. The same forces who propose tort reform support initiatives to eliminate rights for those injured on the job, injured in nursing homes and injured in automobile collisions. Coincidentally, it is big business, big insurance companies and their owned interests in Columbia and Washington who seek to eliminate our right to access our judicial system to seek justice from wrongdoers.

For more information on this subject, please refer to our section on Medical Malpractice and Negligent Care.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Ric Davis

Nursing Home Neglect and Mandatory Arbitration

Josh Christian — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:05:38 GMT

In an article recently posted by the National Citizens Coalition for Nursing Home Reform, the Coalition explains the ill affects of a binding arbitration agreement in a nursing home abuse situation. As is pointed out in this article it is depriving families of choice and accountability for the places in which their loved ones live.

In the article, as NCCNHR points out, mandatory arbitration provisions takes away the right of the families to hold accountable the negligent actions of the nursing homes.

Some admissions agreements even require families to waive their loved one's expectation of receiving the quality of services and safe environment that the nursing home contracted with the government to provide when it was certified for Medicare and Medicaid.1

The NCCNHR is a wonderful source for information and action on protecting your loved one in a nursing home from abuse and neglect.

For more information on this subject, please refer to our section on Nursing Home and Elder Abuse.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Josh Christian

Windsor Manor Sued in Two Wrongful Death Suits

Shannon Weidemann — Wed, 02 May 2007 15:24:15 GMT

A California nursing home has been sued twice with wrongful death suits. A husband and wife are both suing the Windsor Manor nursing home in Concord, California. Both of their mothers died while patients at the nursing home in two seperate incidents. One mother died from a fall while she was unsupervised and unassisted and the other died from apiration pneumonia.

Attorney Jay P. Renneisen, a partner at the Walnut Creek based Nursing Home & Elder Abuse Law Center, who is representing Nancy and Jack Roberts, stated that until meeting Jack and Nancy he had "never seen a situation where a nursing home's neglect resulted in not one but two deaths in the same family." "The Nursing Home & Elder Abuse Law Center reviewed and took on Nancy's case after the state issued a formal deficiency regarding Windsor Manor's obviously substandard care of Nancy's mother, but in the process, we found that Nancy's husband, Jack, had also lost his mother at the same facility and under suspect circumstances. When we discovered that Jack's mother died from a highly preventable bout of aspiration pneumonia, which certainly should never have occurred while she was a patient in a skilled nursing facility, we had no choice but to advise Jack that his mother was also victimized by elder abuse and neglect by this facility" said attorney Renneisen. "Incredibly, this same nursing home robbed both Jack and Nancy of their mothers," added Renneisen.

Windsor Manor has appeared on a Consumer Reports list of a nursing home to avoid five times in the past. The plantiffs did not realize that the nursing home had a record of poor service.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Shannon Weidemann