Protection for Patients

The California Assembly is scheduled to vote today on a bill that would give often frail and largely helpless patients in nursing homes and in mental institutions some extra measure of protection against physical abuse by staff members.

The legislation would bar from employment inside such facilities or with organizations that provide transportation for their patients anyone convicted of a violent crime or sex offense. It would require background checks by the appropriate state department, based on fingerprint files. It deserves approval.

Most employees in most nursing homes treat patients with care. Some do not, with brutal consequences. Assemblyman Lloyd G. Connelly (D-Sacramento), sponsor of AB 1370, has a list of 10 sordid incidents in which patients have been assaulted by employees with felony convictions--tragedies that might well have been prevented with the kind of basic screening that Connelly proposes.

One case on the assemblyman’s list involved a 27-year-old woman in a Palo Alto mental institution who was raped by an employee who had been convicted of rape, sex perversion and assault with a deadly weapon. Another case involved a Sacramento nursing-home employee with a history of indecent-exposure arrests who had served time in state prison. After he was fired, he returned to the home and kidnaped, raped and beat to death a 93-year-old woman patient.

The bill has attracted support from, among others, Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy, law-enforcement authorities including the state attorney general’s office, and the state’s Little Hoover Commission, which documented serious abuses in nursing homes in a 1983 report.

The bill is opposed by the nursing-home industry. Some operators fear extra costs, even though the bill makes it clear that the state would pay most of the expenses of screening because 80% of nursing-home patients are cared for at public expense.

Others fear that the screening would make it even more difficult to attract workers to jobs that already are difficult to fill because of the relatively low pay and the often grim working conditions. They say, for example, that some applicants have an aversion to fingerprinting even if they have nothing to hide. That might be overcome by having the fingerprinting done by private contractors rather than by a police agency.

Nursing-home residents have been major winners in Sacramento this year. Earlier in the session, Gov. George Deukmejian and the California Legislature joined to enact new laws that impose stiffer regulations, higher fines for violations, and more thorough inspections. Those laws took effect immediately.

AB 1370 is a logical next step, adding one more measure of protection for patients.