Nursing homes abandon residents
KRGV.com out of Texas had an article about a resident who was evicted and abandoned by his nursing home and left outdoors for hours. Bonifacio Rodriguez was left sitting on his front porch when a neighbor discovered him. The neighbor says a nursing home van dropped him off at his ex-wife's house, but there was nobody home at the time. Fortunately, she notified the police and tracked down his family. His daughter was shocked.
Jennifer Leon says, "My dad got three strokes, he always walks with holding his hand. He doesn't have that much balance. He could have fallen. If he'd walked he could have fallen. What would have happened?" Rodriguez's daughter says she's filing a complaint with the state.
An administrator at the Village Care Center, where Rodriguez was a resident says, “The nursing home puts medical and physical safety as their top concern." Yeah, right.
There was another article in WPTC.com out of Florida about a ManorCare nursing home trying to evict a resident who suffered a stroke. According to witnesses ManorCare did exactly what it said it was going to do and loaded up Thai Hodges and drove her to the Westgate Tabernacle homeless shelter at night. Fortunately, the shelter refused to allow the nursing home to dump her there.
Her daughter, 27-year-old Alexis Hodges, just got out of the Navy and was living in Virginia. Out of the blue she says she received a call from the Boynton Beach Nursing Home where her mother is staying and the facility said she had to go immediately.
"They said very heartlessly that it wasn't their problem," Hodges said. "They said she wasn't staying there another night...that was going to be it." Hodges said her mother Thai is only 55 years old and, up until July, had been a surgical coordinator at a local hospital. But she suffered a stroke and has since been paralyzed.
"I begged and pleaded with them to give me a few days to find some place for her," Hodges said.
"I'm concerned now with her safety and her care and how its going to be," she said.
What's worse is Westgate Tabernacle said this kind of abandonment is not uncommon- and is only getting worse. "Hospital dumps is what we call them," Negley said "I've seen people wheeled in here in a wheelchair, placed on a chair and then they take the wheelchair away."
Hodges said the hospital that treated her mother- Bethesda Memorial-originally sent her to ManorCare.
ManorCare was given a two out of a five star rating from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid.
ManorCare's Delray Beach facility received only a one star.
