Six Nursing Homes Fined Following Resident’s Death, Lapses In Care

Six nursing homes have been fined in connection with one resident who was physically abused, one who broke a leg and one who was hospitalized with severe dehydration and later died. In two state Department of Public Health [DPH] citations on Dec. 7, Touchpoints at Farmington was fined a total of $2,810 in connection with a resident who was hospitalized in May 2015 in intensive care with severe dehydration and then transferred to hospice care. Maura Downes, DPH’s spokeswoman, said the resident died more than two weeks after the incident, but DPH officials were not able to “substantiate causation between the incident and the resident’s death.”

The home was fined $1,580 in connection with the resident’s decline in fluid intake over eight days in May 2015. The home’s records failed to show that a doctor had been notified about the resident’s fluid intake, the citation said.

Thousands Of Nursing Home Beds Empty As State Rebalances Care

At the Governor’s House Rehabilitation & Nursing Center in Simsbury, 17 of the nursing home’s 73 beds sat empty this spring – a 23-percent vacancy rate that would have been unlikely five years ago. The home’s occupancy has fallen despite its above-average health care quality scores in the federal government’s rating system. “There are a lot of factors – a lot of initiatives out there now to keep people out of nursing homes,” said Keith Brown, the home’s administrator. “And with the increase in home care, we’re seeing a more frail resident population. So we have fewer residents, with higher acuity.”

The Simsbury home is not unique: Nearly a third of Connecticut’s nursing homes are less than 90 percent occupied, with Litchfield and Tolland counties bearing the highest vacancy rates, an analysis of state data shows.