A former employee of an area nursing home is alleging that her employer violated Ohio’s whistleblower protection law, by firing her for raising concerns about nurse understaffing and resident safety.
Chastidy Hanlon is suing the Dublin-based Continuing Healthcare Solutions, Inc., in Athens County Common Pleas Court. The company operates 11 skilled nursing facilities in southeast, northeast and north central Ohio.
According to Hanlon’s lawsuit, she was hired at the end of 2021 to serve as social service director at the firm’s Arcadia Valley facility in Coolville. She claims the facility was “severely understaffed with nurses and state tested nursing assistants,” as a result of which “patient care fell below par, patients were being neglected, problems amongst the nursing staff had arisen, and patient complaints had escalated.”
Hanlon says she reported these issues to her supervisor and a human resources official, but they ignored her reports, and the company “failed to hire additional nurses or remedy the patient neglect.”
Hanlon claims that as more resident complaints continued to come in, she reported the problems via email to the company CEO and a corporate HR person on three occasions in 2023, because she was “concerned the nursing shortages were endangering patients.”
At a staff meeting on Dec. 7, 2023, the lawsuit says, Hanlon expressed her concerns once again, and followed up with an email to corporate officers afterwards. Immediately following the meeting, she was placed on administrative leave pending an investigation. Four days later she was fired.
Hanlon alleges that she was terminated because she reported that staff shortages were resulting in abuse and neglect of nursing home residents, and that this violates both Ohio public policy and the state’s whistleblower statute .
In an answer to Hanlon’s suit filed in April, Continuing Healthcare Solutions denies her key allegations. It says that the reason she was suspended pending an investigation, and then discharged, was “her use of disrespectful language in the presence of employees while under a final written warning for similar unprofessional conduct.”
The company denies retaliating against Hanlon, and claims that any employment actions taken regarding her job “were undertaken in the exercise of legitimate business judgment, in good faith, and for just cause.” It also claims that she “did not make any reports of patient neglect.”
Hanlon is seeking at least $25,000 in compensatory and punitive damages.
Email at jphillips@perrytribune.com
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