Suit Settled Over Nursing Home’s Care of Woman

An Oxnard nursing home has settled a wrongful-death lawsuit that claimed an 85-year-old woman died of dehydration and kidney failure because short-staffed Shoreline Care Center failed to properly care for the Alzheimer’s patient.

The daughter and son of Anna Mary Dumont settled their claim against Shoreline and its Orange County-based parent company, Covenant Care California Inc., earlier this month, averting a trial in January.

The amount of the settlement is confidential, said Mark Hiepler, the family’s lawyer. But the settlement is “a very large amount,” he said, considering Dumont’s age and feeble condition before her death.

“I hope my mother’s death and this case will change their behavior and save other lives,” said plaintiff Barbara Aguilar of Camarillo.

Covenant attorney Alex Giovaniello and Shoreline administrative director Maggie Parreno were unavailable for comment.

Hiepler said the Shoreline settlement should put nursing homes on notice that they must provide adequate care, and also serve to warn the children of enfeebled parents to check staffing levels before placing their loved ones in a nursing facility, however attractive it may be.

“Our hope is that the size of this settlement will send a message to this corporation that they can’t put profits above the care of the most vulnerable people in our society,” Hiepler said. “They had one registered nurse for 72 Alzheimer’s patients. They staffed it low because there’s no minimum state standard, and because it was financially expedient. For what they paid in this settlement, they could have hired a lot of nurses.”

In addition to one registered nurse, six low-paid nurse’s assistants provided care each shift in the portion of the nursing home where Dumont stayed, according to court documents.

Dumont died in late 1997, a week after she was hospitalized with dehydration and bedsores and eight months after her children placed her at Shoreline on J Street in Oxnard. The Oxnard homemaker’s death certificate lists dehydration, kidney failure and an intestinal infection as the causes of death.

Aguilar and her brother, Will Dumont, sued the nursing home a year ago, accusing Shoreline of causing their mother’s death, fraud and unfair business practices for reducing patient care to increase profits. Anna Dumont’s eight-month stay at the nursing home cost $21,000.

According to a November 1998 state investigative report, Shoreline failed to provide adequate amounts of fluids to Dumont, failed to document the amount of liquid she received and put mittens on her hands that prevented her from drinking. The mittens were intended to keep her from scratching herself.

The report said that although Dumont entered Shoreline in April 1997 with a dehydration problem, the amount of fluid she drank was not properly monitored. Between Dec. 1 and Dec. 23, when she was admitted to St. John’s Regional Medical Center, the amount of fluid given to Dumont was recorded just three times, the report said. There was no written report of her condition for the last week of her stay at Shoreline, Hiepler said.

“And on her charts there was no mention of hydration for nearly two weeks,” Hiepler said. “If they had simply just met their own internal policies for hydrating a person she would not have died. It didn’t have to happen.”

After St. John’s called to notify the nursing home that Dumont had died, Shoreline supervising nurse Lydia Pernala said there was little discussion of how the woman became dehydrated, according to the nurse’s sworn statement in October.

“We didn’t discuss her case any further other than noting that she expired,” Pernala said.

Shoreline administrator Parreno also said in her sworn deposition that she did not talk or communicate with Dumont’s nurses about the care they’d given the woman before she died. Parreno said she was not aware that Dumont had a dehydration problem while at Shoreline until a state Department of Health Services investigator cited it during the 1998 investigation.

Hiepler said the Dumont case should be a warning about nursing homes.

” 1/8Dumont’s 3/8 children had a good feeling about this place,” he said. “So don’t trust appearance alone. Find out the nurse-to-patient ratio.”