‘It’s not right’: Founder of nursing home for kids doesn’t want them there permanently

As a healthcare executive and children’s advocate, Marjorie Evans has done almost everything that’s been asked of her in Broward County: She founded a nursing home, Children’s Comprehensive Care Center, for children with medical complexities, and helped develop regulations for similar facilities. She’s consulted for local hospital districts and industry groups. She’s testified regularly before the state Legislature.

Just don’t ask her to defend those state lawmakers and healthcare administrators who insist that it’s good policy for kids to live all their lives in facilities like hers.

“I don’t think children should be in any skilled nursing facility long term,” Evans said in a recent interview. “What they are doing with these kids is totally inappropriate.”

With a master’s degree in counseling, Evans began her career as a volunteer for an agency that worked with children who had profound disabilities. The group’s philosophy, she has said, was to avoid institutionalizing children.

In 1971, Evans founded the Broward Children’s Center, a respected Pompano Beach service provider — the center offers home healthcare, a day care center for severely disabled kids and group homes — that also includes Children’s Comprehensive Care, a nursing home with a license for 36 beds.

Evans said in an interview with the Herald that administrators offer a range of services at the home to protect not only the children’s physical health, but also their intellectual development, such as therapies and educational and social activities. Still, Evans is no fan of housing disabled and medically complex children in long-term care facilities.

Like many things in Florida, Evans said the state’s reliance on longterm care facilities for frail children results from policy decisions that favor Medicaid — the state’s insurer of last resort for impoverished and disabled Floridians that is heavily subsidized by the U.S. government — over state general revenue dollars, which are more restricted.

“Frankly this is all about the money,” Evans said.

“Children should not be living in long term-care facilities,” Evans said. “That is an institution.”

“Every effort must be made to nurture development,” Evans said.

Children with profound disabilities should be afforded the same opportunities to reach their potential, Evans said. “Because children can’t move, can’t talk and cant communicate in any way they get written off,” she said.

“It’s not right to just write them off.”