This is an interesting article that appears in today’s NY Times, about the usual suspects–greed and the deterioration of services in nursing homes. So what’s new about this? Same old story–a chain of nursing homes gets bought up by a private corporation, whose only goal is to make money. So the end result isn’t pretty, not for staff or patients.

From the NY Times

Habana Health Care Center, a 150-bed nursing home in Tampa, Fla., was struggling when a group of large private investment firms purchased it and 48 other nursing homes in 2002.

The facility’s managers quickly cut costs. Within months, the number of clinical registered nurses at the home was half what it had been a year earlier, records collected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services indicate. Budgets for nursing supplies, resident activities and other services also fell, according to Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration.

That alone should make your flesh crawl. Nursing homes are generally poorly staffed, with a serious lack of RNs. So this brilliant suit decided that halving the number of nurses was a great move. Oooo, the profit.

And this happened in Florida, one of those lovely right-to-work states, so the nurses weren’t unionized and couldn’t really fight back.

The investors and operators were soon earning millions of dollars a year from their 49 homes.

Residents fared less well. Over three years, 15 at Habana died from what their families contend was negligent care in lawsuits filed in state court. Regulators repeatedly warned the home that staff levels were below mandatory minimums. When regulators visited, they found malfunctioning fire doors, unhygienic kitchens and a resident using a leg brace that was broken.

“They’ve created a hellhole,” said Vivian Hewitt, who sued Habana in 2004 when her mother died after a large bedsore became infected by feces.

So why didn’t the regulators shut the place down? Why didn’t they start fining the company about $1 million a day until the problems were fixed? I think that strong action needs to be taken, if this type of travesty is going to be addressed in a meaningful way.

Just a few more notes on the importance of nurses…

Nurses are often residents’ primary medical providers. In 2002, the Department of Health and Human Services said most nursing home residents needed at least 1.3 hours of care a day from a registered or licensed practical nurse. The average home was close to meeting that standard last year, according to data.

But homes owned by large investment companies typically provided only one hour of care a day, according to The Times’s analysis of records collected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

For the most highly trained nurses, staffing was particularly low: Homes owned by large private investment firms provided one clinical registered nurse for every 20 residents, 35 percent below the national average, the analysis showed.

Regulators with state and federal health care agencies have cited those staffing deficiencies alongside some cases where residents died from accidental suffocations, injuries or other medical emergencies.

And I also blame the nurses who stayed on there, and who didn’t keep reporting infractions. They should have leaked it to the press if need be, if they weren’t getting any response. There are plenty of jobs in Florida, and by working in a place like this, they are actively contributing to the abuse of the residents. No, they are not helping the patients. They are helping the CEOs, president, VPS, etc, make a fortune.

The article also explains how the corporations make it very difficult to get sued, and very expensive for the lawyers, because of the way the holdings are divided up among investors. Which goes to show, this system is very broken and no one is held liable. Oh, maybe they can sue the nurse who neglected the patient….never mind that she was the only one on duty.

The article points out that people are making huge profits at these homes, at the expense of the patients, and no one seems to be accountable. Aren’t there state laws? What’s the point of having the places inspected if nothing of note is going to be done?