Articles Posted in Inadequate Staffing

For many elderly and disabled residents of Tennessee, help completing day to day tasks can make a huge difference in their quality of life and happiness. Thankfully, Tennessee’s Choices in Long-Term Services and Supports (or Choices for short) program offers a crucial service to help care for adults (age 21 and older) with a physical disability and seniors (age 65 and older). The program provides services to assist eligible residents with daily living activities in their homes, on the job, or in their communities. These daily activities can include home-delivered meals, pest control, household chores, but also services like a personal emergency response system call button that can be used to get help in an emergency. The program allows the disabled and elderly to lead productive lives and stay involved in their local communities, but also provides these services in nursing homes if needed.

While the Choices program provides important benefits to many residents of Tennessee, there is currently a severe shortage of caregivers that is affecting thousands of people in need. Caregivers in the Choices program are required to be hired by managed care organizations, or MCOs, but as of late caregivers have missed appointments with citizens needing their services. Many times, a local senior center has accepted a contract from the government to provide citizens these crucial services. However, the Tennessee Justice Center in Nashville, which fights for those without a voice, recently sent a letter to the state requesting an investigation of just how many MCOs fail to provide regular and timely home based services. It is crucial that MCOs take responsibility for hiring the necessary number of caregivers to provide services to citizens in need, but they must also ensure that caregivers are properly trained and certified.

In a particularly striking example, Knoxville citizen, Army veteran, and cancer patient Joseph Davis’ caregiver missed multiple consecutive appointments at his home in the month before his passing. Joseph Davis’s wife June was unable to assist her husband, and relied on the assigned caregiver to help provide crucial services for Joseph. Their son Matt was forced to miss work frequently without notice to help care for his father when his assigned caregiver missed appointments. The lack of certified caregivers available to assist Joseph Davis receive the care he needed placed a huge burden on him and his family.

Staffers from the Special Investigations Division of the House Government Reform Committee recently reported that between 1999-2001, 30% of nursing homes across the United States were cited for some form of abuse. In total, 5,283 nursing homes and similar facilities were cited for more than 9,000 instances of abuse. While these are staggering figures, they do not take into account the numerous other violations that were not caught.

The abuse reported came in many forms. Examples include bedsores, providing insufficient medical care, malnutrition, dehydration, accidents, poor sanitation, and improper hygiene. Of the 9,000+ instances of abuse, more than 1,600 were bad enough to cause “actual harm to residents or to place the residents in immediate jeopardy of death or serious injury,” according to the report. Some incidents were more serious than others. Some of the most serious involved sexual and physical abuse. Review of the violations revealed residents were hit, slapped, punched, choked, and kicked. Others suffered verbal abuse coming from nurses and other staff members.

Why does abuse like this continue to occur? Safety organizations have been asking this question for decades. Many nursing homes are understaffed, which means nurses and employees are forced to work long shifts. This can lead to mental errors, such as giving a patient the wrong medication. If a nurse must cover someone else’s post, he or she may forget to check on a patient at necessary intervals. Further, overworked employees can become frustrated easily, and physical abuse can manifest itself if an employee takes that frustration out on residents. Inadequate staffing can occur for a multitude of reasons. One is a limited supply of qualified nurses. Another is if a nursing home deliberately places its profits over the well-being of residents and chooses to save money by hiring less staff.

The Tennessee legislature enacted a statute that transforms a lawsuit alleging that a “health care provider or providers have caused an injury related to the provision of, or failure to provide, health care services to a person, regardless of the theory of liability on which the action is based” is to be considered a healthcare liability action only.  No longer can these cases be referred to as medical malpractice cases under Tennessee law. The statute directs us to call these a “healthcare liability action,” no matter what is the actual theory of the case.

Forcing all causes of action that occur in a healthcare setting into “healthcare liability actions” matters quite a bit because it can transform the conduct of businessmen into “healthcare professionals.”   Thus, the standard of proof for a Plaintiff to prove that a “healthcare professional” acted with neglect requires expert proof.  Thus, a businessman making a decision to maximize profits by understaffing a nursing home must be called a “healthcare professional” because of this Tennessee law.

An example of how Tennessee law would work can be found in a New Mexico lawsuit where allegations of systemic understaffing in nursing homes by Preferred Care Partners Management Group have been alleged.  Understaffing is a serious problem in nursing home and long term care settings because any individual caregiver can only care for a certain amount of people before their work product declines and starts to suffer.  Thus, it is extremely important that nursing homes employ an adequate number of caregivers so a certain minimum amount of care is received by each patient.