Scott must be firm getting generators into facilities
Florida’s nursing home industry, which has been whining ever since Gov. Rick Scott ordered facilities to install enough generator power to keep elderly people from dying of heat after the next hurricane, is now asking for permission to be excused from Scott’s emergency deadline.
As of Monday, 54 providers of nursing homes or assisted-living facilities requested variances from the compliance dates, and industry spokespeople expect “a lot more.”
It’s important that Scott not dilute his deadlines and allow these facilities to skip out on their responsibility to keep their residents safe.
Scott announced the emergency rules in mid-September after eight residents of a sweltering Broward County nursing home died after Hurricane Irma; six more died after being evacuated. The storm knocked out power, including air conditioning, to the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills. Some patients had body temperatures as high as 109 degrees.
Scott acted with admirable firmness after the tragedy came to light, ordering emergency rules requiring the state’s 680 nursing homes and 1,300 assisted-living facilities to have generators and enough fuel to power them to keep temperatures at 80 degrees or cooler for 96 hours after the power goes out.
The facilities were given 45 days to submit a plan to meet the generator mandate and 60 days to comply.
Scott is an unlikely candidate for heroism, having signed legislation earlier in his administration that reduced safety protections for nursing home patients and that trimmed the number of hours of direct care patients are required to receive. And before Hurricane Irma hit, the governor assured nursing home administrators that they could call his personal cellphone for help — advice that proved to be of no help to the staff at Hollywood Hills, who said their calls to Scott and Florida Power & Light Co. failed to draw emergency crews in time.
Industry leaders wasted no time moaning about Scott’s emergency order, calling it “alarming” and “impractical, if not impossible,” saying the timetable was unrealistically tight, and pointing to the cost of adding generators: $350,000 for a 120-bed nursing home.
That price comes to $2,800 per patient, which doesn’t sound like too much to spend to save a life. Unless, perhaps, you are state Sen. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, who said of the residents at Hollywood Hills: “You’re dealing with 90-somethings. Some of these deaths would naturally occur, storm or no storm.”
Baxley is a funeral director, and — who knows? — maybe he thinks of people in nursing homes as future customers. He made the remarks Oct. 11 at a Senate subcommittee meeting. He apologized the next day, piously stating the obvious: “No family member should have to fear that their loved one is suffering in a nursing home, particularly during a natural disaster.”
The nursing home industry isn’t stating its objections as crassly as the insensitive senator, but the effect is roughly the same: Don’t ask us to bend over backward to make our facilities any safer.
In fact, instead of showing how quickly they can fix the problem, three industry groups have filed legal challenges to the validity of the emergency rules. An administrative judge is expected to issue a decision within the month.
The state’s counsel last week accused the top lobbyist for Florida’s largest nursing home and assisted-living facility organizations of ulterior motives in litigating Scott’s action: to “relieve them of any obligation to move forward and establish safe conditions for residents of ALFs or nursing homes.”
Sounds about right.
Some variances, of course, will have justifiable reasons behind them. Florida law, after all, does recognize that “strict application of uniformly applicable rule requirements can lead to unreasonable, unfair and unintended results.”
The Scott administration said a facility will be required to show it has made a good faith effort to comply with the rule and has run into practical difficulties. That’s as it should be. Facilities should not be allowed to use the variance process simply as a means of evading the rule.
The governor sounded firm about this emergency rule last month, when the impact of Irma’s winds was still upon us. His administration must remain firm now that industry blowback is picking up.
Facilities should only get a variance if they’ve made a good faith effort to comply with the rule. Period.