Nursing Home Passes Last-Chance Inspection

A last-chance inspection of an Inglewood nursing home has prompted county health officials to recommend reversal of a federal decision to cut off the facility’s government insurance payments.

St. Erne Sanitarium, a 276-bed facility serving mostly low-income medical and psychiatric patients, faced a minimum 60-day cutoff of Medicare and Medi-Cal payments after a county inspection in August. Inspectors said they found more than 90 health violations, including unsanitary conditions, improper dispensing of medication and failure to monitor the condition of patients.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Health Care Financing Administration office in San Francisco approved a county recommendation to end payments to the nursing home, which is at 507 W. Regent St., near downtown Inglewood. The cutoff would have affected most of the patients there, according to St. Erne administrators. The home would have been barred from admitting new Medi-Cal and Medicare patients and would lose all insurance payments by Oct. 10.

But federal officials granted St. Erne’s request for a final inspection to determine whether serious violations had been corrected, according to Stuart Chasen, a supervisor in the county’s Health Facilities Division.

He said county inspectors who returned to the facility Sept. 15 found that the most serious problems had been corrected and that conditions met minimum standards for government insurance payments, Chasen said.

“There are still numerous deficiencies,” he said. “But they are back in compliance. By the rules, we have to recommend that they receive funding.” He said federal officials have not yet responded to the recommendation to continue payments, but he expects it to be approved.

Lance Comfort, a spokesman for the nursing home, said his staff is working to correct any remaining violations.

“We felt we could work with the Health Department and get through this situation, and that’s what we’ve done,” Comfort said.

The August inspection was prompted by complaints from relatives of nursing home residents and by an unidentified public agency. Inspectors reported that they found some patients lying in their own wastes and others with untreated bedsores. They also said staff repeatedly made mistakes in dispensing medication, failed to insure proper nutrition and kept inadequate records.

St. Erne officials moved quickly to correct such problems and others, including the presence of cockroaches throughout the building, and said the problems had been exaggerated.