Force of 1 Monitors Residents’ Treatment : Seniors: An ombudsman is the only outside contact for the elderly and ill living in nursing homes and board-and-care facilities.

Like a volunteer army of one, Frank Mann is the only advocate who regularly monitors the care of 284 residents in Santa Clarita’s two nursing homes and four board-and-care facilities.

His mission: Looking out for elder abuse, patient neglect, improper meals and theft of personal belongings.

For those residents who have no surviving family or whose kin don’t live nearby, a visit from Mann demonstrates that someone still cares. That’s also a large part of his role as a long-term care ombudsman for an agency called WISE Senior Services.

Among the residents in Santa Clarita, “you’ll find that 80% have no living relatives,” said Bill Dailey, coordinator of WISE’s Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program, in the Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys. “We’re the only outside contact for them.”

Contracted by the state Department of Aging to administer and run the ombudsman program for Los Angeles County’s 54,000 nursing home and board-and-care facility residents, WISE is a nonprofit agency based in Santa Monica.

The agency was founded about 25 years ago by a group of West Los Angeles citizens concerned about the unmet needs of senior citizens and was originally called West Side Independent Services to the Elderly.

After Congress passed the Older Americans Act in 1978, all states were required to provide long-term care ombudsman programs, although the law lets each state tailor the program to meet its particular needs and resources.

In Los Angeles County, the job was left to WISE, which has 239 volunteers and 19 paid staffers working in the program.

The volunteers are trained for 36 hours in areas such as residents’ rights, the laws governing care facilities and the problems they are likely to encounter on the job.

Once the 36 hours are completed, the volunteers are certified by the state to serve as long-term care ombudsmen. They are assigned to one or more nursing homes or similar facilities, where they make rounds four to five hours each week. WISE offers additional training periodically as well.

The program has been operating in the Antelope Valley for nearly three years, slightly less in the Santa Clarita Valley, where recruitment efforts have been unsuccessful.

That has left Mann, a 50-year-old realtor who was trained in the Antelope Valley nearly two years ago, to almost single-handedly monitor resident care at the Henry Mayo Newhall Traditional Care Unit, the Santa Clarita Convalescent Hospital and other board-and-care facilities in the Santa Clarita Valley.

He does get assistance on occasion from some of the other 14 volunteers and three paid staffers assigned to the Antelope Valley, but if WISE is to meet its goal of visiting each facility once a week, Mann will need help.

“We wanted to do our first-ever training there in July, but only five people signed up,” said WISE training coordinator and recruiter Estelle Harris, who explained that 10 to 15 volunteers are needed to conduct a training session.

“If you can do it, if you have the time, you should give something back to the community,” Mann said. “I think it’s something more people should get involved with.”

Mann says he decided to join the program after the death of his father three years ago from cancer. As an outsider, he can sometime assess situations better than the relatives of nursing home patients.

“A lot of them emotionally can’t handle seeing a relative like that in the atmosphere that’s involved,” he said.

Even the volunteers sometimes find it tough dealing with the nursing home atmosphere, said ombudsman Patsy McGuirk, 55, of Lancaster.

“As much as the facilities try to make it a residence for them, it’s still a hospital,” she said. “People wear uniforms and there are bells and lights and all of the hospital odors. It’s just not really home.”

McGuirk says many residents have lost their homes, family framework, assets, health, power and autonomy.

So when a urine bag that should have been emptied remains filled for hours, a visit from an ombudsman and a reminder to the facility staff often means getting things done that might otherwise go neglected.

Sometimes, the problems are more severe.

According to Charisse Anderson, WISE’s Long Term Care Ombudsman Program assistant director, about 30 cases of suspected resident abuse in Santa Clarita and Antelope valley facilities were reported by ombudsmen to the county’s Department of Health Services between January and June of 1993.

Of those cases, she said, 17 were considered serious enough to be brought before state authorities. Fines were levied after nine were substantiated as cases of physical or sexual abuse, abuses of patients’ rights, improper medication and fiduciary abuse.

Countywide, for the fiscal year that ended June 30, there were 698 suspected cases of resident abuse reported, with 385 substantiated, Anderson said.

“Most of it is staff-type abuse, where they have abused a resident and somebody is called on a crisis line,” Dailey said. The program divides the county into seven regions (the Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys constitute region seven), Daley said, and each region has a crisis line with another in Sacramento.

Refusing to be more specific for fear of reprisals against patients, Mann said several sexual abuse allegations represent the most serious problems he has encountered as an ombudsman.

Another time, he said, one facility had two patients in wheelchairs roll off the grounds and into the street on separate occasions. Under pressure from Mann, the problem was rectified, he said.

“It’s kind of a delicate situation because these people are in the facility 24 hours a day and we’re not there all the time,” Mann said. “A lot of the time we handle complaints but don’t give the patients’ names because we don’t want retaliation.”

Mann said that despite the ombudsmen’s strategy of handling matters tactfully and with as little confrontation as possible, resentment between facility staff and volunteers is inevitable.

‘We don’t go out there like storm troopers and try to kick butt,” he said. ‘We just try to make sure people are treated the way they ought to be treated.”

Nonetheless, some facilities sometimes try to keep ombudsmen out. In those cases, they are asked to sign a willful obstruction of entry form and are subject to state fines of $1,000 per incident.

But even at that, there are some facilities whose top administrators are glad to hear complaints or disclosures about staffers acting improperly, Mann said.

“It’s just like running a business with hired help,” he explained. ‘There’s a lot of times when the help doesn’t do the things they are supposed to do.”

As emotionally draining as the job can be, McGuirk says that improving the condition or just brightening up a lonely life is uniquely rewarding.

“It may sound hopeless and negative, but it’s not,” she said. “It’s a very uplifting experience. There are so many small glimmers of hope and good that outweigh the bad. I always get something out of it--very intangible, but it’s there.”