WASHINGTON -- Complaints about the abusive treatment of elderly people in nursing homes are often ignored for many months by state and federal officials, congressional investigators said Monday.
Relatives of people who have died in nursing homes told Congress they were outraged that no one had looked into their complaints about substandard care.William J. Scanlon, director of health care studies at the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, said that the federal government would spend $39 billion on nursing home care this year but that complaints about serious harm to nursing home residents "often go uninvestigated."
Moreover, Scanlon said, federal officials do little to prod, supervise or monitor the states, which are responsible for the initial investigations.
Scanlon and two relatives of nursing home residents testified at a hearing of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, headed by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.
The accounting office found that one-fourth of the nation's 17,000 nursing homes had deficiencies that caused "immediate jeopardy or actual harm" to residents. Most fines and other penalties proposed by the federal government are never actually imposed, and nursing homes that correct deficiencies often violate the law again, the auditors said.
David R. Seckman, acting president of the American Health Care Association, a trade group for nursing homes, said the government often seemed more eager to punish nursing homes than to work with them to fix problems.
The GAO said the states had failed to investigate hundreds of complaints like these:
A Baltimore nursing home had no hot water for months at a time. A resident was "sitting in urine for extended periods of time."
A resident of a Detroit nursing home fell, shattered her hip and complained of pain, but X-rays were not taken for three days, and then only after the family demanded attention for her.
A patient at another Michigan nursing home had maggots in the sores of his feet, but the staff would not send him to a hospital because the home's nursing director feared that a state agency would be called in to investigate.
At a Seattle nursing home, "call lights" were not answered, and residents received incorrect medications.