Florida nursing home plays blame game as death toll rises to nine
MIAMI — Four days after the owners of a Hollywood, Fla., nursing home released a detailed time line casting blame for the deaths of eight elders on Florida health administrators and a local utility, Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s administration issued a time line of its own — declaring that the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills “failed to do their basic duty to protect life.”
The time line, and a release of 159 pages of records, fueled an ongoing finger-pointing war between the nursing home and Scott, who was himself a healthcare executive before running for office.
As the parties fought, the death toll rose: Late Tuesday, the Hollywood Police Department reported that a ninth resident from the nursing home, identified as 93-year-old Carlos Canal, had died.
Canal joined eight others who perished the morning of Sept. 13, when a partial power outage, combined with the failure of portable air coolers, turned the home into a deadly hothouse. The deaths are the subject of a criminal investigation by the Hollywood Police Department, together with administrative reviews by two state agencies, the Agency for Health Care Administration and the Department of Children & Families.
The nursing home is adjacent to a private psychiatric facility, Larkin Community Hospital Behavioral Health Services, and the two are affiliated with a troubled South Miami hospital called Larkin Community Hospital. The nursing home and psychiatric facility sit across a parking lot from Memorial Regional Hospital, to which many of the 142 residents were evacuated after several began to succumb to the heat.
“No amount of finger pointing by the Hollywood Hills Rehabilitation Facility ... will hide the fact that this healthcare facility failed to do their basic duty to protect life,” Scott said in a prepared statement late Tuesday. “This facility is failing to take responsibility for the fact that they delayed calling 911 and made the decision to not evacuate their patients to one of the largest hospitals in Florida, which is directly across the street.
“The more we learn about this, the more concerning this tragedy is. Through the investigation, we need to understand why the facility made the decision to put patients in danger, whether they were adequately staffed, where they placed cooling devices and how often they checked in on their patients.”
On Tuesday, nursing home owners challenged efforts by the governor and health regulators to shut the home down.
Calling the home “devastated by the lives lost,” Hollywood Hills asked a judge in Tallahassee to prevent health regulators from going forward with a halt to all new admissions, and a suspension of the rehab center’s reimbursement under Medicare and Medicaid, federal insurance programs for elderly and poor people. Together, the insurers are the lifeblood of most longterm care facilities.
Operators of the nursing home could not be reached for comment late Tuesday.
The tragedy prompted the governor to impose emergency rules last week requiring all nursing homes and assisted-living facilities in Florida to purchase generator capacity by Nov. 15 to keep their residents safe and comfortable in a power outage.
Scott’s time line begins on Sept. 5, when the rehab center, along with every other facility in the state, was told to begin updating health regulators on efforts to prepare for the potentially disastrous Hurricane Irma in a digital database called “FL Health STAT.” All hospitals, nursing homes and assisted living facilities were to provide updates on their efforts twice daily.
Irma made landfall on Sept. 10.