Settlement in Nursing Home Case

The owner of an Inglewood nursing home cited last summer for health violations has agreed to pay more than $56,000 in penalties to settle the county’s allegations of improper patient care.

St. Erne Sanitarium, a 276-bed facility serving mostly low-income medical and psychiatric patients, was cited last August for more than 90 health violations, including unsanitary conditions, improper dispensing of medication and failure to monitor the condition of patients.

Nursing home officials said the settlement, signed by Judge Pro Tem John Dickey in Los Angeles Superior Court, was an attempt to end the controversy but was not an admission of wrongdoing.

Under the agreement reached Tuesday with the district attorney’s office, the nursing home is to pay the county $27,000 for its investigation, $22,500 in civil penalties over the next three years and $7,192 in interest. The facility is also required to keep an approved nursing consultant on the payroll for the next two years and submit a report to the county detailing efforts to improve the home’s operations, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Rod Leonard.

Last summer, county inspectors reported that they found some patients lying in their own wastes and others with untreated bedsores. They also said staff members repeatedly made mistakes in dispensing medication, failed to ensure proper nutrition and kept inadequate records.

A follow-up inspection in September found that the nursing home’s most serious problems had been corrected, although the county reported that numerous minor deficiencies remained. The number of violations dropped to 37 during an inspection early this month and county officials noted much improvement from the previous year.

Daniel C. Zilafro, president of St. Erne Sanitarium Inc., defended the facility’s “excellent” staff and said the home has always offered top-quality care.

“There are constant deficiencies in any nursing home,” he said. “If they want to look long enough and hard enough, they will find them.”

A federal study released in December said more than half of California’s nursing homes fail to provide residents with proper daily care to assure personal cleanliness. Nationally, the study found that 40% of the country’s 15,000 nursing homes do not meet sanitary standards for food and more than 25% fail to administer drugs properly.