Nursing Home Crackdown to Begin

In a move to prevent abuse and neglect of California’s elderly, state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer announced Monday the creation of a multi-agency effort to conduct surprise inspections in the state’s 1,500 nursing homes.

Dubbed “Operation Guardians,” the program will first target Los Angeles, where the U.S. General Accounting Office and congressional investigators recently reported serious problems, and later expand to San Francisco and San Diego, where inspection teams are being developed.

“We want to make sure the problems that currently exist in our nursing homes are aggressively addressed,” Lockyer told about 35 seniors at the Robert Wilkinson Senior Center in Northridge. “This is owed to those who contributed their productive years to help the generations that followed.”

Lockyer and City Atty. James K. Hahn said felonies, misdemeanors and civil citations now will be vigorously enforced. They said inspections--which supplement routine checks every 15 months--will focus on nursing homes with the worst records. But, they added, “no facility is immune from a possible inspection.”

Nearly one-third of California nursing homes caring for Medicare/Medicaid patients were cited for serious care violations, according to a 1998 General Accounting Office report that reviewed federal and state data from 1995 through 1998.

A congressional report issued last November found less than 3% of the 439 nursing homes serving 34,000 Los Angeles County residents were in full or substantial compliance with federal standards during the most recent annual inspections. Almost one in five nursing homes had violations that caused actual harm to residents or placed them at risk of death or serious injury.

California now has 3.7 million residents 65 and older, a number that is expected to double in the next 20 years.

Lockyer said his office, recognizing the need to take better care of the state’s elderly, doubled the Department of Justice’s elder abuse budget to $3 million this fiscal year, which ends in July. Lockyer added that the department increased the number of lawyers from two to four, and the number of investigators from 10 to 20.

Patricia McGinnis, director of the San Francisco-based nonprofit organization California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, said nursing home residents often are mentally and physically abused.

Some get bedsores, and others are forgotten and get so dehydrated they have to be hospitalized. She said that when nursing home residents or their families speak out, they often are punished or kicked out.

“Because a lot of people don’t have family, there is no one there to complain for them,” said McGinnis, who has worked as an elderly advocate for 17 years. “We’ve waited a long time for the attorney general to make abuse and neglect in California’s nursing homes a priority. Now we can tell [nursing home residents], you have somewhere to go.”

Operation Guardian will include the cooperation of such agencies as the attorney general’s Bureau of Medi-Cal Fraud and Elder Abuse, California’s Department of Aging, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office and its Elder Crimes Unit, and in Los Angeles, the city Fire Department and safety code enforcement offices.

Those present Monday--the vast majority of whom do not live in nursing homes--said the new program is a good idea but adopted a wait-and-see attitude.

“It’s rhetoric,” harrumphed 81-year-old Howard Short. A feisty senior who lives alone in Panorama City, Short said his parents died in Los Angeles nursing homes.

“I told my son, I don’t want to go to a nursing home,” he said.

“Talk is cheap,” added 85-year-old Sammie Allen, a San Fernando Valley resident who lives alone. “I’ve heard a lot of promises in my 85 years.”