Major nursing home chain violated federal standards meant to stop spread of disease even after start [View all]

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

Major nursing home chain violated federal standards meant to stop spread of disease even after start of covid-19, records show

By Debbie Cenziper, Sidnee King, Shawn Mulcahy and Joel Jacobs
May 16, 2020 at 11:33 p.m. EDT

Nursing homes operated by Life Care Centers of America, one of the largest chains in the industry, violated federal standards meant to stop the spread of infections and communicable diseases even after outbreaks and deaths from covid-19 began to sweep its facilities from the Pacific Northwest to New England, inspection reports show.

Over the past six weeks, as the nationwide death toll among the elderly soared, government inspectors discovered breakdowns in infection control and prevention at nine Life Care nursing homes that underwent covid-19 inspections overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That does not include deficiencies found at the Life Care Center of Kirkland, Wash., which suffered the country’s first reported outbreak of the novel coronavirus in February.

At several Life Care nursing homes since then, inspectors discovered staff who did not wash their hands or enforce social distancing guidelines, according to the inspection reports. At one home in Denver on May 5, staffers left an isolation room door open, allowing a patient with covid-19 to slip outside into the hallway without a face mask and sit next to a room with two healthy residents. At another home in Colorado, a nursing assistant hovered 12 inches from the face of a coughing patient who was not wearing a mask.

In Michigan, a nursing assistant rolled a blood pressure machine out of an isolation room and into a non-covid-19 room without sanitizing the equipment. In Kansas, inspectors found a nursing home’s infection control log failed to include two patients with fevers — one was sent to the hospital with a 103-degree fever and died. “This failure,” the inspector wrote, “had the potential to affect all 52 residents that resided in the facility.”

The Washington Post obtained a total of 24 Life Care inspection reports from CMS, the federal agency that regulates nursing homes, as well as the state of Michigan and Life Care, though the universe of total inspections may be larger.

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/major-nursing-home-chain-violated-patient-care-infection-control-standards-before--and-after--pandemic-started-records-show/2020/05/16/f407c092-90b1-11ea-a0bc-4e9ad4866d21_story.html