Nursing Homes: Stop Dumping Patients

Gloria Single isn’t asking for much.

The 82-year-old California woman, who suffers from dementia, pulmonary  disease  and other ailments, just wants to go back to living with her 93-year-old husband, Bill, at a Sacramento nursing home.  

Single had lived there until  March,  when the facility sent her to Sutter Medical Center for a psychological evaluation without her or her family’s consent. The hospital cleared her to return the same day, but the nursing home refused to take her back.  

The nursing home, Pioneer House of Sacramento, has continued to refuse to readmit her, even though after a hearing in May the California Department of Health Care Services ordered it to give Single its first available bed.

Single’s best hope for rejoining her husband now rests in a lawsuit filed by AARP Foundation against Pioneer House and its management company, RHF. AARP Foundation hopes to use the case to fight an increase in illegal nursing home evictions. In 2016, AARP and AARP Foundation filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services concerning the state of California’s failure to enforce administrative decisions like the one that found in Single’s favor.

“The problem of patient dumping is one of the most troubling complaints of nursing home residents throughout the country,” says William Alvarado Rivera, AARP Foundation’s senior vice president for litigation. “This is basically a form of abuse by nursing homes that dump these patients, especially Medicaid patients, to fill their beds with ‘better’ residents. Until someone holds them accountable, they can keep doing these things.”

The complaint filed in Superior Court of California says: “Nursing facilities, such as Pioneer House, routinely ignore state readmission orders because the state refuses to enforce them itself.” It says that Single’s case is typical of a practice that some nursing homes use to get rid of patients they don’t want.  

“To maximize profit through decreased staffing, unscrupulous nursing facilities try to illegally evict the residents who are the neediest of staff time and require the greatest levels of care,” the complaint says. “One such method is hospital dumping, in which the facility gives away the resident’s bed when the resident is temporarily hospitalized and refuses to readmit the resident after she is medically cleared to come home.”