Nation's
nursing homes are quietly killing thousands
Articles Courtesy of
the STL.TODAY.com |
By Andrew Schneider and Phillip O'Connor
Copyright 2002
A special report by the
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Posted 10/12/2002
Thousands of America's elderly mothers,
fathers and grandparents are being killed each year in the nation's nursing
homes - frail victims of premature and preventable deaths.
This quiet pandemic is rarely detected
by government inspectors, investigated by law enforcement, appraised by
medical examiners or prosecuted by anyone.
These deaths are not at the hands of crazed
"angels of death."
Most are caused by fatal neglect traced
to caregivers upon whom residents depend for food and liquid and for turning
them in their beds to prevent the formation of life-threatening sores,
say investigators and leading researchers in elderly care.
"Unlawful abuse and neglect is widespread,
underreported, infrequently prosecuted and the cause of untold suffering,
injury, illness and death," Marie-Therese Connolly, who heads the U.S.
Department of Justice Nursing Home Initiative, says in a study published
last month in the Journal of Health Care Law and Policy.
These are examples of the types of deaths
Connolly describes: |
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Pulaski County, Arkansas coroner
Mark Malcolm (left) and deputy coroner Tim Irizarry remove the body of
Willie B. Harris, an 83-year-old woman, for autopsy after she died in a
North Little Rock nursing home. Malcolm decided to further investigate
the death after talking to family members who detailed past treatment for
broken ribs and recurring infections. |
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Donald Mallory, lost 40 pounds in a 37-day
stay in the former Claywest Nursing Home in St. Charles. Court records
state that Mallory, 60, was dehydrated, malnourished and rife with infection
from bedsores when he died. Doctors who reviewed Mallory's medical records
for a lawsuit said neglect caused his death.
Ruby Faye Martin, 88, died in Mount Vernon
Countryside Manor in Mount Vernon, Ill., of sepsis, an overwhelming bacterial
infection that poisons the blood. An evaluation of her medical records
by a doctor who specializes in medical problems of the elderly stated that
the death was caused or exacerbated by malnutrition and multiple infected
bedsores caused by poor care at the nursing home. A home official declined
to comment.
Rex Riggs was in stable condition when
transferred to Beverly Healthcare nursing home in Neosho, Mo., according
to Veterans Administration doctors. Six weeks later, the disabled Vietnam
War veteran, 57, was hospitalized with gangrenous infections that led to
the surgical removal of his scrotum, penis and lower abdomen. He died three
days later. Federal investigators said bad nursing care caused his death.
Prosecutors charged no one in the three
cases.
Government documents and court records
reviewed by the Post-Dispatch show hundreds of similar deaths caused by
neglect in nursing homes across the nation.
The latest national compilation of more
than 500,000 nursing home deaths - for 1999 - lists starvation, dehydration
or bedsores as the cause on 4,138 death certificates. The data, collected
by the National Center on Health Statistics, include 138 such deaths in
Missouri and 186 in Illinois.
But death certificates alone don't begin
to tell the story.
A handful of investigators and researchers,
working in specific geographic areas, took the time to compare patient
medical records with their death certificates. Plaintiffs' lawyers, representing
aggrieved relatives across the country, have gone through the same exercise.
Their findings indicate that the number
of preventable deaths attributable to malnutrition, dehydration and bedsores
from bad care or no care is much higher.
Louisiana Sen. John Breaux, a Democrat
and chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, called deaths from
nursing home neglect "a hidden problem."
"We know it's significant," said Breaux,
noting that investigations by his staff and other research show that 500,000
to 5 million cases of elderly neglect and abuse take place in institutions
and private homes each year, although about 80 percent go unreported.
"The number of avoidable deaths of our
elderly could be in the tens of thousands," said Breaux, who along with
Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah last month introduced the Elder Justice
Act, which seeks to prevent such deaths.
Many medical and regulatory investigators
who work in nursing homes every day characterize the number of wrongful
deaths in terms such as "massive" and "pervasive," based on their daily
experience. Most of the deaths can be traced to an inadequate number of
nurses and aides to provide life-sustaining care. The U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services reported to Congress this year that nine out
of 10 nursing homes have staffing levels too low to provide adequate care.
There are a number of reasons for the shortages,
which plague the entire health care industry, including hospitals. Many
workers are unwilling to accept poverty-level wages for unpleasant, demanding
work that often requires mandatory overtime or double shifts. Constant
corporate focus on the bottom line frequently requires managers to operate
homes with skeleton staffing because the industry says it lacks enough
government money to provide proper care.
Yet, some nursing homes find ways to provide
adequate service with existing staff. Many nurses and aides are dedicated
to their profession and provide excellent, compassionate care.
The American Health Care Association, the
lobbying group for most of the nation's nursing homes, says malnutrition,
dehydration and bedsores "are common conditions associated with the frail
elderly, especially at the end of life."
"AHCA states unequivocally that any incident
of neglect or abuse is unacceptable, but drawing a link of patients passing
away from these maladies as a result of alleged poor care is simply irresponsible,"
the trade group said in a statement.
Finding deaths by neglect
Government studies in two states and the
work of plaintiffs' legal teams begin to document the magnitude of the
problem.
In 1998, the General Accounting Office
assigned three registered nurses (two with advanced degrees in gerontological
nursing) and a physician to determine what had actually killed 62 people
who had died in California nursing homes. They were randomly selected from
nursing homes that had multiple deaths, the GAO said.
The GAO, which is Congress' investigative
arm, subpoenaed medical records and nursing notes, some of them 600 pages
long. Its investigation determined that 34 of the 62 had received "unacceptable
care" and had died of dehydration, malnutrition or raging infections from
uncontrolled bedsores.
For example, one man lost 59 pounds - one-third
of his weight - over seven weeks. A woman who had weighed 100 pounds dropped
to 54 pounds before her death, and another woman developed four pressure
sores so severe that they ate through to her bones. She received pain medication
only three times during five weeks of painful daily treatments for the
infections, the GAO investigator reported.
A year later, in 1999, complaints from
nursing home workers, family members and Arkansas long-term care inspectors
who believed that poor nursing care was killing residents troubled Little
Rock Coroner Mark Malcolm.
"I didn't know. Nobody knew," Malcolm said.
"These poor souls were cremated or buried with no one but the nursing home
or its doctor deciding why they died - whether it was natural causes or
because they weren't properly cared for."
Malcolm and his deputies reviewed about
100 questionable nursing home deaths that occurred from 1993 to 1999. They
interviewed families and nurses and examined whatever clinical information
was available on the deceased, including medical records and nursing home
charts. Seven bodies were exhumed.
Working with the medical examiner's office,
Malcolm determined that more than 30 percent of the death certificates
listed an incorrect cause of death.
"The families were being told by the nursing
homes that their loved ones died of heart attacks, strokes and other natural
causes, but what we actually found was that about a third were wrongful
and preventable deaths, either caused by or exacerbated by dehydration,
malnutrition, including choking, or from sepsis from bedsores," said Malcolm,
who was just appointed to the U.S. Department of Justice's newly formed
forensic working group.
Although the number of cases reviewed was
not enormous, the finding was significant enough to get the Arkansas Legislature
to immediately pass a law - the only one in the nation - that demands that
nursing homes notify a coroner of every death.
Arkansas nursing home regulators say the
new law already has had a strong deterrent effect. The number of citations
for life-threatening care issued against the state's nursing homes dropped
after the law took effect.
Lawyers examine deaths
In every state, there is a group of professionals
who routinely compare the cause of death listed on death certificates with
the medical records of deceased nursing home residents. They are lawyers
representing families who believe their loved ones were killed by poor
care or no care.
An examination by the Post-Dispatch of
hundreds of these court cases across the nation found that the vast majority
of death certificates attributed the deaths to natural causes such as pneumonia,
heart attack and - in some cases - "cessation of breathing," "heart stopped,"
"old age" or "body just quit."
"Our staff examines hundreds of alleged
wrongful nursing home deaths a year, and only a handful of the death certificates
reflected what medical records showed actually killed the person," said
Tim Dollar, whose law firm in Kansas City is Missouri's largest litigator
of nursing home deaths. "Some physicians go to amazing lengths to avoid
admitting that by omission or commission, the nursing home killed these
people."
The Post-Dispatch examined the death certificates
and the physicians' evaluations of 55 nursing home residents in Missouri
and Illinois who died in the past two years and whose relatives decided
to sue for neglect. In 42 of the cases, the newspaper found that the cause
of death listed on the certificate differed from what physicians said the
medical records actually showed. In 40 of these cases, the nursing homes
involved agreed to a settlement with the family before trial or were found
in civil proceedings to have committed neglect.
A deadly trio of neglect
The three causes of death that the Post-Dispatch
examined in its yearlong investigation - malnutrition, dehydration and
bedsores - were selected because government investigators and medical experts
said an overwhelming majority of such cases are preventable with proper
nursing care.
When left untreated, any of the trio spawns
a domino effect of system failures that can kill.
"It's like a house of cards. One slips
out and the whole thing comes crashing down, and death is often inevitable,"
said Dr. Margaret Wilson, a gerontologist and researcher at St. Louis University.
Specifically:
Malnutrition can reduce immunity from infections
to an almost AIDS-like state and can quickly cause loss of muscle strength,
which can lead to increased frailty, pneumonia, kidney and liver failure,
and death.
Dehydration can lead to dangerously low
blood pressure, which can generate strokes and heart attacks. It also can
cause infections, kidney failure, uremic poisoning and death.
Decubitus ulcers or bedsores can result
in flesh being eaten away down to bone and organs, causing a life-threatening
toxic poisoning called sepsis. The sores come from the weight of the person's
body pressing on a bone while lying in bed, which compresses the blood
vessels in the skin and underlying tissues. Within only two or three hours,
red, burnlike wounds appear. If left untreated, this tissue then begins
to decay from lack of blood circulation.
The industry trade group said that many
pressure ulcers develop before a resident enters the nursing home - a statistic
it says is not often reported.
Medical authorities estimate that 12 percent
to 15 percent of the deaths from the three causes could not have been prevented.
They cite residents who have decided not to eat or drink. Others have diseases
that aggravate bedsores or that impede the consumption of nutrition. Still
others have living wills or advance directives that preclude supplemental
food, liquid or medical treatment. Even allowing for those exceptions,
the number of preventable nursing home deaths is far greater than reported.
"It isn't rocket science to say that you
need enough staff to help every resident with eating, drinking and infections.
It's not like we need to discover the cure for the Nile virus," said Catherine
Hawes, a professor and director of Texas A&M University's Southwest
Rural Health Research Center and a national authority in evaluating nursing
home quality. "We know how this is supposed to be done, but in all too
many places it's not."
An earlier tragedy
This isn't the first time that government
regulators, law enforcement and medical professionals failed to detect
that vulnerable victims were being killed.
"These preventable deaths in nursing homes
are almost parallel to the realization 30 years ago that child abuse was
an undetected and lethal problem," said Paul Weidenfeld, an assistant U.S.
attorney in New Orleans.
Children would be rushed into emergency
rooms with concussions or broken necks. Doctors would call the deaths tragic
and chalk it up to the fact that babies fall out of cribs and kids tumble
from trees or down stairs.
"Finally, people started questioning: How
did the child fall? Why did that happen? And it was realized that enormous
numbers of children were being abused, were being killed, and crimes were
being committed," said Weidenfeld, who is co-chair of the Louisiana Nursing
Home Working Group, a team of federal and state agencies that investigates
poor care.
In the 1970s, doctors diagnosed so many
children with unexplained head injuries that medical journals of the period
were writing about spontaneous subdural hematomas - bleeding under the
lining of the brain.
"They called it spontaneous because they
just happened without any clinical reason for it," said Dr. Patricia McFeeley,
New Mexico's assistant chief medical investigator. "Everyone believed they
developed naturally.
"It wasn't until medical, law enforcement
and death-investigation professionals realized that these fatal bleeds
were being caused by violence, that these children were not dying of natural
causes, but were being killed, did we change the way we handle these deaths,"
McFeeley said. "This is what we must do with the elderly. We can't trust
the old system to catch these deaths."
Deficiencies are rampant
About 3 million people a year pass through
America's 17,000 nursing homes. Patients occupy about 1.8 million beds
on any given day; most are white women who are at least 75 years old.
Many of the 1.3 million cooks, janitors,
administrators, nurses - the majority working for near poverty-level wages
- treat their jobs as a calling to ease the pain and safeguard the dignity
of their charges.
But it is the homes and workers that don't
perform up to standard that concern most of the 700 professionals interviewed
by the Post-Dispatch for this series. They include nurses, researchers,
physicians, patient advocates, death investigators, nursing home operators,
prosecutors and federal, local and congressional investigators.
In their eyes, government regulators are
losing the war - and in some cases, not even fighting the battle - of preventing
negligent deaths of the elderly.
They tell of state investigators failing
to ensure safe care in homes; of government-mandated ombudsmen being prevented
from intervening; and of federal regulators unable to do much about it.
These experts attribute the negligent deaths,
in most cases, to inadequate numbers of nurses and aides on hand to provide
basic, life-sustaining care. The detection of these deaths, they say, is
often thwarted by state nursing home inspectors who fail to see - or act
upon - the warning signs. The experts complain that law enforcement authorities
are rarely notified of deaths by neglect and that coroners and medical
examiners are seldom called.
Collin Wong, a California deputy attorney
general who heads his boss's aggressive program to halt wrongful nursing
home deaths, said that killings by neglect often are overlooked because
"too many people shrug it off by saying, 'Old people die. So what.'
"This is not to say that every death in
a nursing home should be treated as a homicide and every injury as an assault,"
Wong continued. "But at the same time, these deaths shouldn't automatically
be chalked up to old age and natural causes. This is a major faulty perception
that is allowing this pervasive neglect, these homicides, to continue."
Many deaths are called criminal
"It's homicide. Don't sugarcoat it," says
Dr. Vincent Di Maio, the medical examiner for San Antonio. He has extensively
researched negligent deaths in nursing homes.
"Enormous numbers of patients are being
killed in nursing homes throughout the country because the administrators
or the corporate executives order the staffing reduced to the point where
the staff cannot provide the promised care that's needed for their patients
to survive," he said.
Some prosecutors agree.
Finding that regulatory fines and bureaucratic
sanctions have had minimal impact on reducing dangerously poor care, a
small but increasing number of prosecutors have brought homicide charges.
They've targeted nurses and aides found to be responsible for the deadly
care and nursing home operators and corporate officials who fail to employ
enough nurses to prevent these deaths.
Prosecutors gained allies among some state
regulators who also are calling for criminal charges when death by neglect
is confirmed.
"If it can be proven that the failure to
feed, hydrate or properly care for wounds led to deaths in nursing homes,
they should be considered as potential homicides and turned over to law
enforcement for criminal investigation," said Darrell Hendrickson, Missouri's
new deputy director of the Division of Health Standards and Licensure.
In Hawaii, Indiana, California and Tennessee,
district attorneys, county prosecutors and state attorneys general have
brought some charges of homicide for nursing home deaths by neglect over
the past three years. But they number fewer than a dozen.
In Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Virginia, Florida,
Kentucky and Missouri, U.S. attorneys have used a Civil War-era law to
bring federal civil charges in these types of deaths.
Each year, thousands of allegations of
wrongful deaths in nursing homes are brought in courtrooms across the nation
by aggrieved family members. Court records show that most of these cases
result in judgments against the nursing homes or pretrial settlements.
But many judgments are sealed, which prevents the public and state regulators
from finding out about the offending nursing home.
Misleading death certificates
The widespread undercounting of deaths
attributed to the three preventable conditions is due mainly to the lack
of accuracy - or what some investigators contend is intentional deception
- exercised by doctors in filling out death certificates. Many are signed
by physicians who have never seen the body.
"I see a lot of death certificates signed
with myocardial infarction, which means: 'I don't have a clue because I
wasn't there when the person died,'" said Dr. John Morley, a St. Louis
University gerontologist.
Jeanie Keyser-Jones, a professor in medical
anthropology at the University of California at San Francisco School of
Medicine and a nationally recognized expert in nursing care, said: "Far
too many death certificates list the cause as cardiac arrest, but that's
(usually) a wastebasket diagnosis because obviously, everybody's heart
stops when they die."
In January, the Indiana health department
processed a death certificate that attributed to natural causes the death
of an 80-year-old woman from respiratory problems and cardiac failure.
That surprised the Evansville coroner's office, which, after an extensive
examination and an autopsy, had just ruled the woman's death a homicide.
The coroner said death was caused by severe dehydration. Nursing home records
gave no indication that the woman had been fed or given liquid for days,
he said. No sign of heart damage was found.
No one in Missouri signed more death certificates
in the past four years citing malnutrition as the cause than Dr. Constantino
Carpio.
Of the 242 malnutrition deaths in nursing
homes listed in Missouri records during that period, the health department's
vital statistics database of death information shows that Carpio signed
46.
But he denies it.
"I never sign malnutrition. I always put
down bronchial pneumonia as the cause of death," said Carpio, who said
he cared for 500 patients in 11 nursing homes around Troy, Mo.
When asked why, he answered: "That's what
the textbooks say old people die of. You can look it up."
When Charlotte Gregory, 78, died in September
2001 in the Meadowood Nursing Center in Clear Lake, Calif., court depositions
show employees tried to persuade two different physicians to list her cause
of death as heart disease. Both refused, saying there was no evidence that
heart failure had killed Gregory. An autopsy demanded by her family showed
she had died from infection from a ruptured colon aggravated by dehydration
and a misplaced feeding tube.
"It's murder," Dr. Marvin Sando, Gregory's
son-in-law and a retired physician, said when he saw the autopsy results.
"Whether it was unintentional or through indifference, a preventable death
occurred, and it's still homicide."
The district attorney's office in California's
Lake County says it is examining the evidence in the case.
Without a public outcry for reform, the
outcome is predictable, say advocates for the elderly.
"If you don't feed somebody, they will
die. If people aren't given adequate liquids, they will die. If an elderly
person's major infection isn't treated, they will die," said Candace Heisler,
who retired after 25 years of handling abuse and neglect investigations
as an assistant district attorney in San Francisco. She works as a consultant
to law enforcement and lawyers.
"Bad care is often as deadly as having
a knife in your hand and aiming it at their heart."
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