‘Corners getting cut.’ NC nursing home insiders share firsthand stories of patient neglect
Dr. Glenn Withrow has seen what happens to nursing home residents when staffing is short.
Some who spend their days in bed develop pressure sores because nurse aides don’t turn them frequently. Some don’t get the physical therapy they need. Some sit in soiled adult diapers for hours.
One of Withrow’s patients, who lives at a Chapel Hill nursing home, struggles with agonizing chronic pain. But overwhelmed workers sometimes don’t give him pain medication until hours after he’s scheduled to get it, the family doctor said.
“He told me the other day, ‘I wish I was dead. This is torture,’ Withrow recounted.
Withrow is one of many North Carolinians who have called and written to The Charlotte Observer in response to Left Alone, the newspaper’s recent investigation into staffing shortages that endanger thousands of the state’s nursing home residents.
Joy Williams remembers the shock she felt in August 2020, after removing her 81-year-old sister from a nursing home in Wake County and discovering that her legs were black from the knees to the ankles.
“It looked like (her legs) were rotten, which is the only way I can describe it,” Williams said.
Williams immediately took her sister to a doctor. “He said, ‘If you hadn’t gotten your sister in here, in four weeks she would have lost her legs or gotten gangrene and died,” Williams recalled.
Her sister’s medical condition, which the doctor traced to a lack of circulation, cleared up under Williams’ care. But she said she finds it inexcusable that the nursing home allowed the problem to become so severe.
“We couldn’t believe she was in that condition,” Williams said. “That was just a lack of care.”
‘The straw breaks’
Gwynn Moore, 91, is one of Withrow’s patients. Some days, Moore said, the janitor at her nursing home in Hillsborough is the only employee in sight. She likes to trade a joke with him: “I think we’re the only ones here. We’re going to run the place today.”
But she knows the staff shortages aren’t funny.
Her roommate can’t walk, the retired commercial artist said. But she will sometimes try to get out of bed and collapse to the floor. She’ll often be forced to lie there for 10 minutes until Moore can roll her wheelchair down the hallway in search of a nurse aide to help.
“It’s a serious problem,” Moore said.
Barry McCrory is a volunteer with the state’s Long Term Care Ombudsman Program, a job that requires him to inspect facilities in Mecklenburg County.
State and federal regulations require nursing homes to provide residents call bells so they can summon help. McCrory makes a practice of testing them. More than half of the time, nobody responds to them, he said.
When McCrory talks with residents, he also checks to make sure they have water beside their beds. If they don’t, he’ll get it for them. Some down an 18-ounce cup of water in a few quick gulps.
“That tells me they haven’t had water in a long time,” he said.
During the three months he spent in nursing homes in Gastonia and Cornelius in early 2021, Fred Rogers said he was given just one shower.
And he remembers calling out for someone to change his adult diaper, but waiting for two or three hours before he got help.
“When I turned my emergency light on, it seemed like forever before I got attention,” the 80-year-old Cornelius resident said.
A serious pressure wound on his heel festered for months while he was inside the nursing homes. By the time he got home in April 2021, his foot had not healed and he still couldn’t walk, his wife, Flo, said.
“Three months in rehab and there’s no rehab? Come on!” Flo said.
Ken Fleming, who owns a home care agency in Charlotte, hears from a number of employees who have worked at short-staffed nursing homes. On some days, they were asked to work 24 hours straight. On others, they were expected to care for more than 20 residents by themselves.
“That’s asking a whole lot of somebody,” he said, adding: “There are probably corners getting cut. There are probably residents who have soiled themselves and push on their call bells and can’t get help quickly.”
For some nurse aides, it’s just too much.
“Finally the straw breaks,” he said. “They leave because they can’t tolerate it.”
The Charlotte Observer wants to hear about your experiences with North Carolina nursing homes. If you’ve had experiences you think others should know about, please share them here.
This story was originally published April 19, 2022 at 10:58 AM with the headline "‘Corners getting cut.’ NC nursing home insiders share firsthand stories of patient neglect."
.JPG)