IN- HOUSE CRITICISM
Gov. Rauner’s own administration critical of Legionnaires’ notification, documents show
Gov. Bruce Rauner’s own administration formally rebuked the state agency overseeing the Quincy veterans’ home for how it told staffers about the fatal Legionnaires’ disease outbreak after workers there got sick in 2015.
The state Department of Labor reprimand focused on a pair of emails Illinois Veterans Home administrators sent to state workers and concluded the Illinois Department of Veterans’ Affairs “failed to effectively notify all employees” about the 2015 outbreak.
That unpublicized finding uncovered by WBEZ seriously undercuts insistent public claims by outgoing Veterans’ Affairs Director Erica Jeffries that her department was “very clear” in its Legionnaires’ warnings to staff in Quincy.
The first of two mass emails that Jeffries has held up as proof the home’s workforce was informed early significantly downplayed the outbreak.
The Aug. 22, 2015, email from the home to nearly 140 staff members emphasized with all capital letters that there had been “an UNCONFIRMED diagnosis” of Legion- naires’ and admonished workers not to talk about it with residents. “The last thing we need is for the residents to get worried and upset,” the email said.
It also came with this underlined assurance in bold that was repeated in an Aug. 25 email: “I want to reassure all staff that if we truly felt there was an issue with Legionella, we would not put the residents or staff at risk.”
But 19 hours before the Aug. 22 email, state health officials alerted the home’s former administrator that a 90- year- old man and 89- year- old woman tested positive for Legionnaires’, WBEZ has found.
As that email was circulated, three workers who were later tested positive for Legionnaires’ were actually displaying symptoms, state records show. All told, eight staffers were sickened during outbreaks in 2015, 2016 and 2017.
The damaging revelations come at a delicate juncture for Rauner, who wants lawmakers this month to approve a $ 245 million replacement of the facility, where 13 residents died from Legionnaires’ since 2015.
“That’s not how you communicate a public health emergency to your staff members, who are going to be instrumental in understanding this outbreak and controlling this outbreak,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Center for Health Security in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.
Jeffries, who will resign May 18, insisted Quincy employees were kept abreast of the outbreak through emails, mandatory meetings and information at nursing stations.
‘ This is a sensitive case’
The Labor Department’s involvement represented a scenario in which the Rauner administration essentially was investigating itself.
On Sept. 4, 2015, state records show, the Labor Department began probing unsafeworkplace complaints from two sickened employees. In an email that day, a supervisor described the matter as a “sensitive case.”
An investigator assigned to the case interviewed one woman, who fell ill on Aug. 14, 2015, and missed about a week of work. Her doctor misdiagnosed her with pneumonia, prescribed antibiotics, and admitted her to the hospital. But she only learned of the outbreak after returning to work at the home and tested positive for Legionnaires’ four days later.
In another case, a nursing assistant with a 103- degree fever was admitted to the hospital and tested positive for Legionnaires’. She told the investigator the facility never alerted her to the outbreak, which she learned of through news reports.
On the strength of those claims, the Labor Department considered on Sept. 21, 2015, whether the home violated a state law requiring public employers have safe workplaces, state records show.
Labor Department spokesman Ben Noble said ex- agency director Hugo Chaviano later approved issuing only the written reprimand because no workplace safety standards were broken.
By Feb. 8, 2016, the agency closed its investigation with the letter to Jeffries, noting a “safety concern that while not violating any OSHA standards, should be addressed.” The letter then detailed findings. “The employer failed to effectively notify all employees of the outbreak or instructed [ sic] them as to proper precautions to avoid or eliminate exposure in a timely manner. It was discovered that although a mass email was sent to employees informing them of the outbreak, not all employees had email, and subsequently were not able to be informed until sometime after the first email was sent,” the letter noted.
The fight with labor: ‘ My blood is boiling’
In February, Nettie Smith, president of AFSCME Local 1787 and a licensed practical nurse at the home since 1993, told lawmakers she learned of the outbreak through Facebook.
Jeffries responded to a joint legislative committee investigating the outbreaks with an unusually aggressive response: a 209page rebuttal of what she called “inaccurate and misleading” testimony from Smith and another AFSCME official.
Notably missing from Jeffries’ critique was the state Labor Department finding, which the panel’s Democratic co- chairs learned about from WBEZ.
The omission prompted state Sen. Tom Cullerton, a Villa Park Democrat, to accuse Jeffries of “lying to the committee.” Her spokesman disagreed. The Veterans Affairs’ Department “has been transparent concerning its response to the outbreak in 2015 and has provided thousands of documents to both members of the media and the General Assembly,” agency spokesman Dave MacDonna said.
But a top union official disputes that transparency claim, noting much of the union’s information about the 2015 outbreak came from local and federal health authorities, not the state.
Anne Irving, AFSCME’s director of public policy, also is indignant at Jeffries for being selective with facts in her rebuttal. “My blood is boiling they would spend the time putting together a document like this when it was clearly false,” Irving said. “I’m just furious.” Dave McKinney and Tony Arnold cover state government and politics for WBEZ. Follow them at @ davemckinney and @ tonyjarnold.