Nursing Care Chain Is Accused of Neglect : Health: Advocacy group pickets headquarters of Golden State Health Centers, which runs 10 facilities in the L.A. area.
Two dozen protesters Tuesday picketed the Sherman Oaks headquarters of a nursing home chain, accusing the company of neglecting its elderly patients.
Golden State Health Centers Inc. and its 15 nursing homes were hit with dozens of citations and $300,000 in fines by the state in 1993 and 1994, said officials of California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, the group that staged the protest.
“Why (Golden State)? . . . I’ll tell you why,” said Pat McGinnis, executive director of the San Francisco-based reform group, as sign-wielding demonstrators marched in front of the company’s office on Ventura Boulevard. “They have citation after citation for patient abuse and patient neglect.”
Protesters complained that the state has collected only a small fraction of the fines. Pointing out that about $60 million of the company’s $75 million in annual revenues are paid by state and federal health-care programs, they said taxpayers are being cheated as a result of the inadequate care the company provides.
“The government is giving them all this money and not effectively enforcing laws,” said Kim Kelley, special projects coordinator for the group.
But Sol Goldner, Golden State’s vice president and chief financial officer, said his company’s compliance record is good. “Quite frankly, we don’t understand (the protest), because we run some of the finest facilities in the state of California, and perhaps in the nation,” he said.
Considered a medium-sized chain, Golden State has 10 of its nursing homes in the Los Angeles area, including six in the San Fernando Valley and Glendale.
Kelley said Golden State is the first nursing home owner to face a protest by her group, but probably not the last. She said the idea of targeting specific operators followed the anti-regulatory fallout from last November’s state and federal elections.
“We needed to go back to the streets and let the nursing home owners know that we’re not going to put up with it any more, because they’re not hearing it anywhere else,” Kelley said.
“We’re keeping an eye out for facilities that have higher-than-average citations and fines.”
But Goldner said his firm was unfairly singled out, arguing that most of the chain’s citations and fines involved two homes in Bakersfield and San Diego that it plucked from bankruptcy and has invested large sums to improve.
And while company officials acknowledged that they have paid only $39,000 of the penalties, they said some of the fines are under appeal, and others were canceled when violations were corrected, as is routinely done.
Victor Arkin, who runs the state nursing home inspection program in Los Angeles County, said the company generally “falls right in the middle,” of nursing home operators in Los Angeles County. “In some instances, their facilities have fewer than average deficiencies, and there are a couple of facilities we do have concerns about.”
But Arkin and Golden State officials said the protesters gave an incomplete account of an episode in June at a nursing home in Chatsworth. The incident involved a 91-year-old Alzheimer’s patient who “was transferred to the hospital with acute dehydration and numerous bedsores and subsequently died,” according to the group’s handout.
The handout said Golden State received a class A, or very serious, citation and an $8,000 fine for the incident at the nursing home on Craggy View Street in Chatsworth.
But the company appealed, and a hearing officer later eliminated the fine, concluding that the “violation identified . . . had no more than a minimal relationship to the health, safety and security” of the resident.
