Nursing home must pay $20M, jury says
Parkview Healthcare Center found liable for abuse, deaths
A Hayward nursing home that saw major COVID-19 outbreaks during the peak of the pandemic and allegedly neglected patients well before then will have to pay almost $20 million in damages and court costs after a jury found it responsible for the deaths and abuse of residents.
At the end of a four-month trial, the Alameda County jury found Thursday that Parkview Healthcare Center committed “fraud in the commission of neglect,” according to Susan Kang Gordon, one of the attorneys for the 10 plaintiffs — five nursing home residents and the families of five patients who died. They were awarded $9.6 million in punitive damages from the center and its parent company, Mariner Health Care.
Earlier in the phased court proceedings, the jury awarded the plaintiffs $3.9 million in compensatory damages for “pre-death pain and suffering,” as well as millions of dollars in attorney costs and fees, Kang Gordon said
She said the almost $20 million sum that the jury decided Parkview and Mariner should pay is in the “high range” of jury verdicts in elder care litigation, although not unprecedented. “I think it sends a strong message,” she said.
In a statement to this news organization, Mariner Health Care spokesperson Dan Kramer said his company and Parkview “are reviewing their options, including appealing the findings regarding punitive damages and one of the more unusual elements of this case: the court’s decision to combine ten plaintiffs with unrelated claims into one lawsuit.”
The lawsuit details problems it contends began well before COVID-19 devastated nursing homes but says were exacerbated by the pandemic. Bay Area News Group documented some of those problems last year.
The problems were rooted in persistent staffing shortages, according to the lawsuit and past interviews with patients’ families.
A lack of proper staffing resulted in patients going without proper wound care or bathing. Linens, towels and diapers were constantly in short
supply, leaving residents sitting in filth, according to the patients’ families.
In 2018, at least four patients were sexually or physically assaulted by another resident who was allowed to roam freely around the facility, according to the lawsuit. The patients screamed for help, sometimes for more than half an hour as they were assaulted. One resident pressed her call button next to the bed repeatedly — but no one came.
Multiple patients in the facility suffered from scabies and head lice outbreaks. Some sustained injuries when they were left unattended, such as a man who fell while trying to get into his wheelchair. The wheelchair’s brakes had not been applied, and he broke his hip and developed a respiratory infection as a result of the fall, the suit claims. He later died from multiple complications.
Another resident fell out of a wheelchair in April 2019 while unattended and suffered traumatic brain injuries, the lawsuit also contends. That’s when his family discovered he had sores on his leg and had developed a gangrene infection. His leg had to be amputated, and he died in August 2019 of complications from his poor care, according to the lawsuit.
When COVID-19 hit, it amplified the facility’s problems. Family members reported not being able to confirm with Parkview whether their loved ones had tested positive. From a distance, they worried that the short-staffed facility wouldn’t be able to stop the virus from invading.
The daughter of one Parkview resident told this news organization last year that her father often would try to summon nurses using his call button and no one would come.
“It was immediately obvious that they were shortstaffed,” said the daughter, Nancy Sanchez. During her father’s two years there, staff neglected to properly care for wounds, according to the lawsuit.
Her father, Jose Sanchez, contracted COVID-19 at the facility last year and later died at a hospital.
He was one of 18 residents who died of COVID-19, according to records from the state health department. In all, 111 people caught the virus.
This spring, about a year after the Parkview patients and family members filed their lawsuit, the state sued Mariner, accusing it of “trading people for profits at every turn.” That lawsuit is still pending.
Mariner “siphoned off funds necessary for appropriate staffing,” according to the complaint filed by the California Department of Justice and the district attorneys of Alameda, Marin, Santa Cruz and Los Angeles counties.
Those prosecutors allege that low staffing levels in Mariner’s nursing homes have resulted in insufficient care, leading to unnecessary leg amputations, bone ulcers, infection spread and unreported sexual and physical assaults.
The suit also accuses Mariner of illegally booting residents from its facilities without legal due process or proper discharge procedures in an attempt to free up beds up for new Medicare patients, who bring in more money than those on Medi-Cal. Mariner also falsified information reported to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services to boost its ratings, according to the suit.
In July 2020, after this news organization reported that six Parkview patients had died of COVID-19 and families were suing over staffing issues, state investigators for the Division of Occupational Safety and Health launched an investigation.
Cal/OSHA fined Parkview Healthcare Center $67,500 for “serious” violations: The facility did not quickly enough isolate patients with COVID-19 or suspected of having it and did not make sure employees wore masks or knew how to properly don protective gear, according to the investigators’ notes.
Jennifer Fiore, one of the three attorneys representing the 10 plaintiffs, said patients were treated by the nursing home “like everyone is just a bed to them.”