Nursing Home Defendants Are Fined in Plea Bargain

The corporation that owns Corbin Convalescent Hospital, and its president, pleaded no contest Friday in Los Angeles Municipal Court to criminal charges stemming from the alleged mistreatment of patients at the Reseda nursing home.

Thomas Konig, president of Summit Care-California, which owns Corbin, pleaded no contest to one of 39 criminal counts filed by the city attorney last summer. As part of a plea-bargain arrangement, charges against William Pierpont, Summit’s chairman, were dropped.

Under the agreement, Summit also pleaded no contest to 10 counts. Corbin Convalescent Hospital, which held the license for the nursing home, pleaded no contest to 25 counts.

Rights Allegedly Violated

The city attorney had alleged that the 157-bed nursing home failed to keep the patients clean, did not properly treat bedsores, failed to follow physicians’ orders and violated patients’ rights.

Konig, who made his plea to a count charging that the nursing home “failed to be maintained in a clean and sanitary condition and in good repair,” was placed on three months’ probation and ordered to pay fines and penalties of $800.

Corbin was fined $1,700 and Summit was ordered to pay $30,000 to establish a training program to teach relatives and friends of nursing-home patients how to improve the quality of their lives and care. The program will be run by a nonprofit group or government agency to be named by the defense and prosecution.

Summit, the nation’s 12th largest nursing-home provider with 4,359 beds as of 1983, also must establish a system under which corporate officials will review within 10 days any county health citations issued against one of its homes. The corporate officers must discuss a citation with the staff of the nursing home cited and make sure deficiencies are corrected.

The procedures are required during a six-month corporate probation, but Corbin’s attorneys said a similar review process is permanently in place already.

Friday’s resolution of the criminal case did not entirely satisfy either the attorneys representing Corbin or the president of a group of patient-advocates in the San Fernando Valley.

Konig and Pierpont, who were not in court, declined to comment. Attorney Robert J. Gerst, who headed the nursing home’s defense, said the pleas were not an admission of guilt, but a business decision.

‘Total Disruption’

“It is not in the best interest of anybody to engage in a protracted lawsuit with enormous legal fees, plus the total disruption of the company and its staff,” Gerst said.

Gerst said he regretted that a fundamental question in the case--whether corporate officials are liable for any malfeasance committed by a nursing-home staff--would not be resolved by a court. He predicted that, if the case had gone to trial, the question eventually would have been addressed by the California Supreme Court.

Carol Brotman, who heads Families for Quality Care in Nursing Homes, said she was disappointed with the punishment meted out to Konig and the nursing home.

‘No Justice’

“I think the insultingly low fines mean there is no justice for the nursing-home patients that were lying in urine and feces, getting rotten skin to the point of bedsores and getting care that could endanger their lives,” Brotman, whose mother was a former Corbin resident, said. “For a multimillion-dollar corporation such as Summit, this is like putting a penny in a parking meter.”

Deputy City Atty. Gary Rowse, the prosecutor in the case, said the plea bargain was the best that could be struck under the circumstances.

Rowse said he could find no evidence directly linking Konig or Pierpont to the problems cited in the criminal complaint. He said investigators searched for evidence, such as memos from the two men instructing Corbin personnel to ignore patients or to reduce staffing levels to dangerously low levels.

‘Nothing Was Found’

“They had a year to cement their case; nothing was found,” said David J. Wilzig, the attorney representing Konig. “I think that is an extraordinary statement.”

But Rowse said he hoped that the charges against Corbin executives and their corporations would have a deterrent effect on nursing-home providers. “I hope the nursing-home industry will pay attention to this, that we will go after corporate officials,” he said.

Many of the criminal misdemeanor charges stemmed from 10 serious health code violations Los Angeles County health inspectors discovered during surprise visits to the nursing home early last year. Corbin later was fined $66,000, one of the largest fines ever levied against a California nursing-home operator, but the sum eventually was lowered to $24,000.

License Still Endangered

The resolution of the criminal charges did not end the possible legal problems for Corbin or Summit, which took over the nursing home in 1980. Ralph Lopez, chief of Los Angeles County’s health facilities division, said the state still could revoke Corbin’s license.

In October, 1983, Lopez asked the state Department of Health Services and the state attorney general to hold a hearing to determine whether Corbin’s license should be revoked. The county is still awaiting an answer.

Lopez said, however, that Corbin had “greatly improved” its operations since it received its highly publicized fine last year. The health department has issued no citations against the home since March, 1984.

But Lopez noted that the nursing home “was out of compliance for two years . . . what’s to say it will be running well in another two years?”