Here’s the latest article from the Sun Sentinel’s Sally Kestin:

Florida’s attorney general has ordered a review of a state system that allows convicted felons to work in day care and nursing homes, after a Sun Sentinel investigative series.

In a letter to legislators this week, Bill McCollum said the series highlighted the “disastrous results” of Florida’s exemption process that has cleared more than 8,700 people with criminal pasts to work as caregivers of children, seniors and the disabled.

A Central Florida woman with a record for aggravated assault won an exemption from the state to work in a nursing home, where she stole $36,000 from patients, the newspaper reported.

“With her violent criminal background, she should have never been given the opportunity to work in a position of trust,” McCollum wrote. The Republican official directed his staff to review existing laws and policies and make recommendations before the Legislature convenes in March.

Legislators are already working on changes to state law to restrict who can receive an exemption and for what crimes. One proposed bill would ban people with records for violence and fraud from ever getting clearance to work as a caregiver.

The Legislature created exemptions two decades ago as a second chance for people with long-ago or minor offenses in their past.

But the Sun Sentinel’s “Trust Betrayed” series found the state also granted exemptions to career criminals and people convicted of rape, kidnapping and murder. A dozen registered sex offenders were cleared to work along with 200 people charged with harming children.

Research in Florida has found that as many as half of convicted felons commit more crimes within five years of their release, said Joe Jacquot, the attorney general’s chief of staff.

“The state shouldn’t give people the opportunity to do so,” he said.

Lawmakers have also pledged to fix other problems identified by the Sun Sentinel series. Caregivers would have to pass a nationwide background check before they could begin working with children, the elderly or disabled, under proposed legislation.

Now, many caregivers undergo a criminal history search in Florida only, and can be on the job several months before the results come back.

The reforms have the support of George Sheldon, secretary of Florida’s Department of Children & Families. Sheldon has written a four-page letter to lawmakers outlining his plan to tighten screening requirements and exemptions, and met with legislative leaders this week.

The newspaper series “really made a tremendous difference in people’s resolve to address these issues,” said state Sen. Nan Rich, D-Weston. “I think this is just going to be a no-brainer.”

Sally Kestin can be reached at skestin@SunSentinel.com or 954-356-4510.

This headline in Sunday’s South Florida Sun-Sentinel caught my attention. Halfway through reading the  article, I was speechless. Thanks to reporter Sally Kestin and the Sun-Sentinel for allowing me to re-publish the article here on the Florida Senior Living Advisor blog.

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By Sally Kestin, Peter Franceschina and John Maines South Florida Sun Sentinel

Florida seniors and disabled adults too frail to live on their own have been beaten, neglected and robbed by caregivers with criminal records.

A cancer patient at a Pompano Beach assisted living facility watched helplessly from bed as a nurse’s aide with a record for theft rifled through her handbag and stole $165.

“What are you doing with my bag?” a police report quoted her as saying. “You have no right. Put it down.”

A video camera caught an aide at a North Miami Beach group home for the disabled shoving a cerebral palsy patient face-first to the floor, busting her lip. The aide had previously pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and never should have been working there.

More than 3,500 people with criminal records — including rape, robbery and murder — have been allowed to work with the elderly, disabled and infirm through exemptions granted by the state the past two decades, a Sun Sentinel investigation found. Hundreds more slipped through because employers failed to check their backgrounds or kept them on the job despite their criminal past.

In Palm Beach County, a woman with pending forgery charges got a job at a nursing home, where she assaulted a patient.

Glades Health Care Center in Pahokee did a background check on Phillina Anderson in 2004, but it did not turn up the charges, said Francine Hennessy, chief operating officer of the Council on Aging of Florida, Inc., which owns the facility. If it had, the nursing home would not have hired her, Hennessy said.

Anderson was still on probation in that case when she was arrested for abusing patient Cora Edwards.

Near the end of her shift on July 13, 2007, Anderson became upset with Edwards, a stroke victim with Alzheimer’s disease, according to an arrest report.

Anderson told Edwards to “shut up” and slapped her “extremely hard” across the face.

“Why did you hit me?” the elderly victim cried out, according to the report. “I never did anything to you.”

Anderson was convicted of abuse on an elderly person and served three months in jail. Hennessy said the nursing home learned after her arrest that she had been accused of abusing a resident at another facility that did not report it.

“We were very surprised,” she said. “Her background check was clear.”

Screening gaps

Florida has a patchwork of controls for checking caregivers of the elderly that seems to put more emphasis on protecting against embezzlement than safeguarding patients.

Inconsistencies in state law are glaring — facility owners, administrators and people who handle money require a nationwide FBI check, but not employees caring for patients. With some exceptions, they are checked only for crimes in Florida.

For nursing homes, a background check must be complete before anyone can work. But for assisted living facilities and home health aides and companions, employees can begin work before screening results come back.

“It ought to be consistent,” said Bob Blancato of the Elder Justice Coalition, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., that supports nationwide background checks for all employees.

Holly Benson, head of the Florida agency that regulates health care facilities, said the discrepancies are a result of different laws passed over more than a decade. “A lot of the way that this policy evolved is just kind of hit or miss,” said Benson, secretary of the Agency for Health Care Administration.

Of more than 100,000 people screened through AHCA over the past 3 1/2 years, more than 3,420, or 3 percent, were rejected because of a criminal history for offenses that included murder, exploiting the elderly and elder neglect, a Sun Sentinel analysis shows. The jobs include positions at clinics and treatment centers as well as nursing homes and agencies caring for the elderly.

Under Florida law, certain crimes disqualify someone from working with seniors or the disabled unless they obtain an exemption by showing evidence of rehabilitation.

Until this year, the disqualifying offenses did not include financial crimes that can lead to abuse and exploitation. An expanded list takes effect Thursday — eight years after a committee of prosecutors and state regulators recommended adding crimes such as burglary, fraud and forgery.

The patchwork screening system puts Florida’s most vulnerable adults at risk, the Sun Sentinel found.

Latoera O’Neal was able to care for seniors for two years in the Panhandle because she was screened only for offenses she might have committed in Florida.

In Ohio, O’Neal was an admitted cocaine dealer and served time in prison for a drug offense. Her out-of-state record only came to light when she switched jobs to work with the disabled.

Florida’s Department of Children & Families conducts nationwide criminal background checks of employees who work with the mentally and physically disabled. DCF first found O’Neal was disqualified as a caregiver, but gave her an exemption to work in 2004 after she said she had found God and being a caregiver brought joy to her heart.

While working at a group home in Fort Walton Beach in 2007, O’Neal dragged a mentally disabled man out of a van by his feet, slamming his head on the floorboard and the pavement, an arrest report said. She now faces a charge of abusing a disabled person.

Tierra Henry got a job in 2004 at a North Miami Beach group home operated by United Cerebral Palsy of South Florida.

Henry had served a year of probation for a 2001 charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Henry, then 19, hit a 15-year-old girl in the head with nunchuks, a martial arts weapon, a Miami-Dade Police report said.

“I told them straight up before they even hired me,” Henry said in an interview. “I told them I had a fight with a girl from high school … They gave me the job, no problem.”

DCF reviews the results of national FBI checks on caregivers of the disabled, while criminal history searches in Florida go directly to employers, who may miss disqualifying charges or fail to remove people as required.

United Cerebral Palsy thought Henry was clear after receiving a letter from DCF showing no record on her FBI check, said Leigh Kapps, an executive director. But Kapps’ agency should have checked her background in Florida and disqualified her based on the aggravated assault offense, a DCF spokeswoman said.

A year later, a video camera at the group home recorded Henry approaching a 22-year-old resident with cerebral palsy, grabbing her arm from behind and pushing her to the floor. Henry pleaded guilty to aggravated abuse of a disabled adult and is serving four years’ probation.

Rules ignored

Patients and their families have no way of checking employees’ criminal histories. Personnel files are confidential, as they are for any private business.

The Agency for Health Care Administration relies on employers to check the backgrounds of employees working with the elderly. State inspectors are supposed to ensure screening requirements are met but inspect nursing homes on average only once a year and assisted living facilities every other year.

Inspection data shows the system fails to weed out employees with disqualifying records and is slow to remove them once hired.

Screening problems are among the four most common violations in assisted living facilities, adult day cares and nursing agencies. Home health agencies and nursing homes are also cited, but less frequently.

At nursing homes, where a completed background check is required before starting, some employees had worked as long as seven years without any check.

A nurse in West Palm Beach was on the job despite several “misdemeanors and felonies” in the personnel file, and another worked more than a year without undergoing screening “due to lack of facility funds to pay for the background check,” a state inspector reported in April 2008. A background check costs about $25.

Supervisors at a Sunrise nursing home knew about a housekeeper’s record for cocaine trafficking and possession but kept him on because they felt he “deserved a break,” a June 2008 inspection found.

“The teeth aren’t long enough or sharp enough,” said Don Hering, head of Florida’s Long-term Care Ombudsman Council, which investigates elder facilities. “People who know how to game the system, they fine them, they give them 30 days to clean up their act, then it’s back to business as usual.”

‘Last thing on your mind’

Joan Loughman never thought about the pasts of the staff at the Lyford Cove assisted living facility in Fort Pierce when she admitted her ailing father in 2002, said her husband, Tom.

Loughman selected the facility after meeting its marketing director, Andrew Gosciminski, at the hospital treating her father. Gosciminski helped her move her father’s belongings and admired her 2-carat diamond ring and other jewelry worth $40,000, records show.

“That for me set off an alarm,” said Tom Loughman, who remained in the couple’s Danbury, Conn., home. “I called her and said that conversation really bothered me. I told her, ‘You have to be careful.’”

On Sept. 24, 2002, the day before she was scheduled to fly home, Loughman, a grandmother and Girl Scout volunteer, was found dead in her father’s Hutchinson Island home, her throat cut and her jewelry missing. That night, Gosciminski gave his girlfriend a diamond ring, according to court testimony.

Gosciminski was convicted of murder and sentenced to death, but the Florida Supreme Court overturned the verdict last fall based on insufficient physical evidence. Jury selection in his retrial began last week.

Gosciminski, who had felony theft and worthless check convictions in Broward County, did not even need a background check to work at Lyford Cove. He fell into a category of employees not required to undergo screening — administrators who do not provide “personal services” to residents.

“They claimed they were given the OK by the state to hire him because he wasn’t actually doing hands-on care of residents,” said Bennie Lazzara Jr., a Tampa attorney who represented Loughman’s family in a lawsuit against the facility.

Lyford Cove settled the lawsuit for undisclosed terms and is under different ownership.

Tom Loughman, an accountant, said family members assume employees caring for their loved ones have been thoroughly checked out.

“When you’re under the gun of trying to find a place for your relative and they’re in the hospital and they’re dying, it’s the last thing on your mind as to whether it’s a safe facility,” he said. “You assume with the state regulating them, that’s a given.”

Sally Kestin can be reached at skestin@SunSentinel.com or 954-356-4510.
Peter Franceschina can be reached at pfranceschina@SunSentinel.com or 954-459-2255. ]]> http://www.flseniorlivingadvisor.com/blog/2009/09/30/felons-working-in-florida-nursing-homes-newspaper-investigation-finds-yes/feed/ 1 http://www.flseniorlivingadvisor.com/blog/2009/09/15/jacksonville-nursing-home-employee-charged-with-sexual-abuse/ http://www.flseniorlivingadvisor.com/blog/2009/09/15/jacksonville-nursing-home-employee-charged-with-sexual-abuse/#comments Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:15:09 +0000 Florida Senior Living Advisor http://blog.flseniorlivingadvisor.com/?p=202 The Florida Department of Children and Families is investigating an alleged case of sexual abuse of an elderly resident at a Jacksonville nursing home. The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office arrested 35-year-old Anthony Mgugua Njorge early Sunday morning at Regents Park nursing home. He is charged with sexual battery on a mentally impaired and physically helpless victim.

The latest inspection report of Regents Park, conducted by the Florida Agency on Health Care Administration in August, gives the facility just one star out of five in most categories. According to the AHCA website, “The fewer stars a facility receives, the more the facility was found to be in noncompliance with the regulations governing nursing homes.” The Federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services also publishes a Nursing Home Compare web site that provides additional information to compare nursing homes in Florida and the nation.

In this particular incident, a witness told police she heard something from one of the rooms, and when she went in she saw Njorge engaged in a sexual activity with a woman in the room. The woman is disabled.The witness told police she reached for her cell phone, but Njorge tried to stop her.She was able to make a call and someone else came into the room. That witness told police she saw Njorge cleaning up and then throw something in the disposal room.

DCF Spokesperson John Harrell says his agency has investigated eight allegations of abuse at Regents Park in the past year, though none have been verified.

“Of those eight reports, four showed no findings, but four had some findings, including inadequate supervision [of patients]. That happened a couple of times,” Harrell said.

Njorge also worked at Life Care Center, another Southside nursing home. DCF is now looking into whether the attack is an isolated incident.Police are withholding any further information due to the nature of the crime and the investigation. Njorge remains in jail on a $500,000 bond.

Florida Senior Living Advisor offers a complete searchable database of all senior living facilities in Florida, including nursing homes, assisted living facilities, adult day care centers, skilled nursing units, independent living, continuing care retirement communities and hospice. As part of your research on particular facilities, you can check their rating in the AHCA guide; of course, you should always visit and inspect a facility in person before making such an important decision.

In the less than three months since I launched Florida Senior Living Advisor, this is now the fourth incidence of abuse that I am reporting. In this most recent case, a Broward County woman faces charges of abuse of an elderly person after she allegedly attacked a 65-year-old patient at the Manor Pines Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Fort Lauderdale. To make matters worse, the patient suffers from Parkinson’s disease.

Eronie Deverlus, 50, was arrested a few days ago by law enforcement officers with the Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit. According to Sandi Copes, a spokeswoman for Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, Deverlus was a nursing assistant at Manor Pines and While working at the center, she allegedly struck the female patient in the face after becoming angry with the woman.

Deverlus, who was fired shortly after the incident, is charged with one count of abuse of an elderly person, a third-degree felony. If convicted, she faces up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.

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.