Troubled nursing home says it has added staff and improved care

An Iowa nursing home that was recently fined more than $300,000 and added to a federal list of the nation’s worst care facilities says it is making improvements in resident care.

The Garden View Care Center in Shenandoah has been cited for 23 regulatory violations so far this year. After an April inspection, federal officials fined the home $306,335.

Garden View is currently one of 10 Iowa care facilities eligible for inclusion on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Special-Focus Facility List, which is a national list of homes with some of the worst records of regulatory compliance. The home also has the lowest possible ratings from CMS on all three of the measures charted by the federal agency: quality of care, staffing levels and regulatory compliance.

A Florida-based public relations firm, B2 Communications, says it is now working with Garden View’s management and says the center “is getting a lot of questions about what has been done, and is being done, to improve the care at the facility.”

A written statement that B2 Communications said could be attributed to the facility’s management describes the incidents that led to the fines as “unacceptable,” adding that the problems have all been addressed and corrected, with some employees immediately suspended and then fired.

“Our new ownership group, which bought the facility in June, is driving significant improvements to ensure that incidents like this don’t happen again,” the written statement says. “In particular, the ownership is focusing on increased staffing and additional clinical support to patients. The facility is 100% compliant, and we will work hard to continue to improve the quality of care at Garden View.”

State records indicate Garden View is owned by Shenandoah Properties, a limited liability company based in Jackson, Mississippi.

In April, state inspectors visited Garden View and cited the home for failing to protect residents from abuse; failing to have sufficient nursing staff; failing to maintain sanitary conditions; failing to provide residents with physician-prescribed supplemental oxygen; failing to develop a care plan for residents; failing to provide adequate grooming and bathing for residents; failing to change wound dressings; failing to provide scheduled physical therapy for  residents; and failure to protect two residents from accidents that led to bone fractures.

The inspectors reported that the facility’s call-light equipment indicated residents of the home were sometimes waiting two or three hours for workers to respond to the call lights used to summon assistance.

During their visit, the inspectors reported seeing residents with long, dirty fingernails and disheveled, greasy hair. Residents, workers and the facility’s own records indicated baths often weren’t being provided due to the home being short-staffed and the day-shift workers refusing to give baths.

One resident was seen by an inspector laying naked in a bed with urine-soaked sheets. Ten different employees of the home told an inspector that when they began their shifts in the morning, they’d often find residents lying in sheets soaked with urine.

While the inspection was still underway, state officials notified the facility that residents of the home were deemed to be in “immediate jeopardy,” which is a term that indicates a high-level regulatory violation.

The next day, inspectors downgraded the violation based on the home’s stated plans to correct the problems and the “immediate jeopardy” status was removed. The Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals says that it takes that action only after a “corrective-action plan has been verified in compliance with CMS regulation.”