NursingLink

WASHINGTON - A government program that brings extra scrutiny to poorly performing nursing homes leaves out hundreds of troubled facilities, investigators report. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services identifies up to 136 nursing homes as "special focus facilities" subject to more frequent inspections because of their living conditions. In every state except for Alaska, there are between one and six ...

DAYTONA BEACH - A State Department of Children and Families Inspector General's Investigation found that many staffers at a Daytona Beach Veteran's Nursing Home found the workplace environment to be problematic. The probe found that 35 of 57 staff members had particular concerns about the administrator at the Emory L. Bennett Memorial State Veteran's Nursing Home. The administrator, Belkis Pineyro-Wiggins, was ...

A Georgia woman expelled from nursing school 13 weeks before graduation will receive $450,000 for her ordeal, a jury has decided. Sara Castle, 55, was thrown out of Appalachian Technical College in Jasper, Ga., after she blew the whistle on an instructor who wasn't providing students with sufficient clinical training time, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Friday. Castle said she and the ...

NHS nurses came under fire today for their "cruel" and "demeaning" treatment of elderly patients. TV agony aunt and former nurse Claire Rayner said she was "sickened" by what has happened to some parts of her profession. The president of the Patients Association also called for "bad" nurses to be struck off the medical register. A report from the charity today ...

The family of a 69-year-old woman has filed a lawsuit against a suburban nursing home for failing to protect her from being sexually assaulted by a 21-year-old mentally ill resident. Maplewood Care's administrator tried to cover up a rape by calling it consensual sex, said attorney Pete Flowers, who represents the woman's family and called the case against the Elgin facility ...

SYDNEY – A pack of mice mauled a bedridden 89-year-old man at an Australian nursing home, shredding parts of his ears and prompting the government Thursday to launch an investigation into the facility. Federal Minister for Aging Justine Elliot ordered a probe into what the government-run nursing home in Queensland state was doing to protect residents, saying in a statement that ...

Kentucky's government-run mental health hospitals and nursing homes have become a revolving doors for private nurses who work short stints and move on, an arrangement that cost the state millions each year, according to audit findings released Tuesday. State auditors said in the report that the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services could have saved millions of dollars annually by ...

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A group of nursing homes in California and Texas will pay up to $450,000 to employees who said they faced discrimination for speaking Spanish at work. U.S. District Court Chief Judge Audrey B. Collins ordered Skilled Healthcare Group and several related nursing facilities to pay as many as 53 workers and offer them English classes. The consent ...

CARTHAGE, N.C. – A North Carolina grand jury leveled eight murder charges Monday against a man arrested after a deadly rampage that killed eight people at a nursing home last month. The Moore County, N.C., panel indicted Robert Kenneth Stewart, 45, in the deaths of seven nursing home residents and a nurse at the Pinelake Health and Rehab Center in Carthage. ...

Residents of nursing homes are one of the main reservoirs of anti-microbial resistant bacteria, U.S. researchers said. Study leader Dr. Erin' O'Fallon, a geriatrician at Hebrew Rehabilitation Center and a research fellow in medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston said that the prevalence of a certain form of drug-resistant bacteria -- multidrug-resistant gram-negative organisms -- far surpassed that of two ...

CARTHAGE, N.C., April 7 (UPI) -- A man accused of shooting eight people to death in a North Carolina nursing home says he doesn't remember the slayings, documents indicate. Search warrants made public in connection with the arrest of Robert Stewart, 45, of Moore County, N.C.show Stewart allegedly told a nurse after shootings that he taken six "nerve pills" before the ...

Rockingham, N.C. — Jerry Avant Jr., a 10-year veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard who was killed in a shooting rampage Sunday at a Carthage nursing home, was expected to be laid to rest Thursday afternoon in his hometown of Rockingham. Doctors said the 39-year-old was shot more than two dozen times while trying to shield others from a gunman ...

CARTHAGE, N.C. – A gunman barged into a North Carolina nursing home Sunday morning and started "shooting everything," going room to room in a terrifying rampage that killed seven residents — most in their late 80s — and a nurse who cared for them. Authorities said Robert Stewart also wounded three others, including the Carthage police officer who confronted him in ...

The health care costs of Alzheimer's disease patients are more than triple those of other older people, and that doesn't even include the billions of hours of unpaid care from family members, a new report suggests. Compared with people aged 65 and older without Alzheimer's, those with the mind-destroying disease are much more often hospitalized and treated in skilled-nursing centers. Their ...

CHICAGO — Ivory Jackson had Alzheimer's, but that wasn't what killed him. At 77, he was smashed in the face with a clock radio as he lay in his nursing home bed. Jackson's roommate — a mentally ill man nearly 30 years younger — was arrested and charged with the killing. Police found him sitting next to the nurse's station, blood ...

Diann Snyder has a simple rule at the long-term care home where she's director of nursing: Restraints are not an option. "If you restrain a resident, you actually see some desperation," Snyder says. "They experience some anguish. You kind of break their spirit. They give up. " When she joined the staff of the Thornwald Home in Carlisle, Pa., 15 years ...

Nursing home shoppers beware: That five-star facility, as ranked by a new federal rating system, may not be the best of the best. That's because the system only compares the homes against their peers statewide, instead of against the 15,800 nationwide. And it automatically assigns five stars, the highest possible, to the top 10 percent, a system that one critic likened ...

It offers an array of services that can be helpful to anyone facing a life-threatening or life-limiting illness -- in addition to that person's family, said JoAnn Davis, the chief executive of Hospice and Palliative CareCenter of Winston-Salem. "That family will never be the same again," Davis said. "I want them to pick up the phone and call us." Hospice can ...

ALBERT LEA, MINN. - Two young women charged with abusing seven nursing home residents faced a judge for the first time Wednesday in a courtroom packed with relatives of the residents. Brianna Marie Broitzman and Ashton Michelle Larson, both 19, of Albert Lea, did not enter pleas in Freeborn County District Court. Judge Steven Schwab set bail at $6,000 for their ...

President-elect Barack Obama will have plenty on his plate when he takes office in January, but a recent story about nursing homes should add to the list. The Associated Press uncovered a change in federal rules on nursing home inspections that, some believe, restricts access to information about care facilities. The changes were adopted by the Bush administration and went into ...