Rising nursing home violence spurs lawsuit increase

Daily Record and the Kansas City Daily News-Press, May 11, 2005 by Nora Lockwood Tooher

(This article first appeared in Lawyers Weekly USA, Boston, MA, another Dolan Media publication. )

The Evansville, Ind. nursing home official told Barbara Becker that her mother-in-law had fallen and injured herself. But a conscientious nurse told her the truth: A disturbed patient with a criminal past had slammed Helen Straukamp, a frail 83-year-old, into a wall so violently that she was knocked unconscious.

Straukamp was standing in a hallway with her arms folded when a 66-year-old male resident attacked her.

He grabbed her by her folded arms, lifted her off the floor, slammed her into a wall and arm rail and knocked her out, Becker said.

Straukamp never regained consciousness. She died three weeks later on Oct. 13, 1999.

Becker pressured the local health and police departments to investigate the incident. She also discovered that the assailant had a string of arrests for alcohol-related violence before he was admitted to the nursing home.

A coroner ruled Staukamp's death a homicide.

The male resident was charged with involuntary manslaughter, but died before his case went to trial. Becker and her husband, Tony Becker, sued the Westpark Rehabilitation Nursing Center where the attack occurred, and settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.

The case is one of a growing number of nursing home patient-on- patient assaults.

In 2003, the most recent year figures for which are available, the number of reported patient-on-patient assaults increased to 5,515, from 5,000 in 2000, according to the federal Administration on Aging.

During the same time period, the number of reported nursing home patient-on-patient sexual assaults shot up 51 percent, to 1,302 in 2003.

It's a huge issue, said Mark Miller, an elder rights specialist with the National Association of State Units on Aging.

Experts say that some patient-on-patient violence is caused by elderly patients with Alzheimer's or dementia who are not properly supervised. But a major part of the violence, according to Miller, is due to mixing of populations where you have younger, mentally ill people mixing with older folks who have dementia and can't defend themselves.

With few long-term housing options, young, mentally ill people, homeless people and people with criminal backgrounds are ending up in nursing homes alongside vulnerable 80-year-olds.

It's an outrageous combination of the mentally ill and criminals warehoused with traditional nursing home residents, Becker said.

A study by Perfect Cause, a California-based nonprofit organization, found 380 registered sex offenders were residing in 289 nursing homes in 37 states as of June 2004. Florida, Illinois, Missouri, Ohio and Texas had the highest numbers of registered sex offenders in nursing homes.

The group cross-checked addresses of online registries of sexual offenders with addresses of nursing homes.

Growing nursing home violence is fueling an increase in civil lawsuits by families of patients who have been assaulted by other residents, according to several elder law specialists and nursing home defense lawyers.

And, as public concern mounts over potentially violent nursing home residents attacking other patients, nursing home administrators and state legislators are grappling with how to balance patients' rights to privacy with residents' safety.

Florida and North Dakota are considering legislation that would require nursing homes and assisted-living facilities to conduct background checks of prospective residents and ban convicted sex offenders.

'Caught In The Middle'

Ed Towey, a spokesman for the Florida Health Care Association, which represents the nursing home industry, said that nursing homes - which would be required to shoulder the cost of background checks - are concerned about the expense.

In addition, he said, delaying a patient's admission to a nursing home from a hospital for a background screening would drive up already soaring health care costs.

Nursing homes also face complex legal issues as they try to screen patients based on private information, such as medical records.

The nursing homes are kind of caught in the middle, Towey said.

Last May, Minnesota Attorney General Mike Hatch filed a lawsuit against Concordia Care Center, a Minneapolis nursing home, for failing to warn the home's residents, families and case workers that sex offenders were living at Concordia along with vulnerable adult residents.

Concordia settled the lawsuit without admitting wrongdoing.

But two of the nursing home's former operators pleaded guilty last October to two charges of criminal neglect for housing sex offenders who were accused of sexually assaulting other patients.

The case sparked discussions within the legal community and nursing home industry about disclosure and privacy issues in nursing homes.

One of the questions was, 'How could this happen? How could my mom be living in a facility next to someone with a criminal record and not know that?' said Eric Carlson, an attorney with the National Senior Citizens Law Center in Los Angeles.