Jun 02 2009
Nursing Home Complaint Center Launched
The nationally renowned advocacy group, Americas Watchdog, has created the Nursing Home Complaint Center to draw attention to senior citizens suffering wrongful death, abuse and neglect. America’s Watchdog describes itself as a “National Advocacy Group for Consumer Protection and Corporate Fair Play.” It’s the same group that has been helping to lead the charge against allegedly toxic Chinese drywall. They have also received attention for their Mortgage Inspection Service, intended to keep consumers from being cheated or overcharged when they finance or refinance their home.
According to America’s Watchdog,”once our legal team is in place, the Nursing Home Complaint Center will focus weekly press releases on elder abuse, Medicare or Medicaid fraud, Class Actions, or Wage and Hour investigations.”
They are interested in the following issues:
- Nursing homes not providing patients with minimum time per day.
- Nursing homes over billing Medicare for testing that was never done.
- Nursing homes not changing patients for a 24 hour period of time. (the patient then gets septic infections and then they often die)
- Nursing-home care firms that, instead of sending an actual nurse, send a undocumented worker to spend the day with the patient.
- Nursing homes not paying overtime to their employees, or abiding by fair labor laws.
- Possible class issues related to standard of care, drug costs, testing schemes, etc.
I will be interested to see what develops from this group. Unfortunately, I suspect they won’t have any trouble finding complaints against nursing homes to try to splash all over the evening news. Certainly there are many wonderful nursing homes throughout Florida and the entire country that are providing quality care and service to patients. But I also think that in many of these facilities, employees are overworked, underpaid and not monitored closely enough. Maybe just the creation of this complaint center will be enough to get some nursing homes to pay closer attention to safety, quality and customer service.
We’ll see. I’ll report back as I learn of updates from America’s Watchdog.