Bedsores

In an highly unusual step for such a case, a Philadelphia jury yesterday leveled $5 million in punitive damages against Jeanes Hospital and a Wyncote nursing home in the death of a man who developed ultimately fatal bedsores while at both facilities. The damages - $1.5 million against Jeanes and $3.5 million against the Hillcrest Convalescent Home - came two weeks after the same Common Pleas Court jury awarded $1 million in compensatory damages in the case. The damages were awarded to the widow of Joe N. Blango, who died of bedsores in 2008, two years after being discharged from Jeanes Hospital in the city's Fox Chase section.

The state Attorney General's Office has decided to drop involuntary manslaughter charges against two former officials of a West Philadelphia nursing home where a resident died of infected bedsores. The decision to drop the misdemeanor charges against officials of the Care Pavilion at Walnut Park came 10 days after a Philadelphia Municipal Court judge threw out a similar case against officials at the Cobbs Creek Nursing Home. The two Care Pavilion officials - former administrator Molly Yates-Levy and former director of nursing Barbara Cassidy DeSabato - were charged last fall with not taking the necessary steps to keep patient Margaret White, 75, from developing seriously infected bedsores.

A Burlington Township rehabilitation center for senior citizens is being sued by two women who claim negligence by the staff led to the premature death of their 68-year-old mother. Bolstering the lawsuit is a September 1996 Department of Health investigation that cited the Marcella Nursing and Rehabilitation Center for providing inadequate care for Marietta Shoemaker, a retired Mount Laurel cashier who suffered advanced lung cancer. Both the lawsuit, filed Monday in Camden County Superior Court, and the DOH report say that Shoemaker, the mother of four, suffered needlessly from bedsores and skin problems that were left untreated for the 2 1/2 weeks she stayed at Marcella.

Early this month, 83-year-old William Young was taken from his room at the Tucker House Nursing Home in North Philadelphia to the Hahnemann University Hospital emergency room. He was covered with more than 20 bedsores, and a strong, foul odor emanated from his wounds. One bedsore, on his right shoulder, was so large and deep that muscles, tendons and bones could be seen. Young was also dehydrated and malnourished. After examining Young, Hahnemann nurse specialist Linda Thomas was "outraged and horrified" at what she saw, according to an affidavit of probable cause filed by the state Attorney General's Office.

The largest nursing-home chain in the Philadelphia area pleaded no contest yesterday to involuntary manslaughter in the gruesome deaths of two nursing- home residents who were poisoned by poorly treated, infected bedsores. Attorneys for GMS Management Inc., a subsidiary of Geriatric and Medical Centers Inc. (Geri-Med), entered the plea of no contest to the misdemeanor charges and it was accepted by Common Pleas Judge Carolyn Engel Temin. In addition to paying $20,000 in fines, Geri-Med will pay $100,000 to cover the cost of the state attorney general's investigation of the two deaths.

The owner of two West Philadelphia nursing homes has agreed to pay $160,000 and cede control to a federally selected independent manager in order to settle government claims of substandard care for its residents. The settlement between the government and the corporate owner of the Mercy-Douglass Human Services Center, 4508 Chestnut St., and the Stephen Smith Home for the Aged, 4400 W. Girard Ave., was described in a consent agreement filed yesterday at the federal courthouse in Center City.

A nursing home owner was ordered to stand trial yesterday on charges of involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment and Medicaid fraud in the deaths of two women at West Philadelphia nursing homes. The women - Margaret White, 75, who lived at Care Pavilion at Walnut Park, and Elizabeth Ellis, 66, who lived at Cobbs Creek Nursing Center - allegedly were allowed to rot to death from infection and untreated bedsores. After a week-long preliminary hearing, Municipal Court Judge Michael J. Conroy ruled that the state Attorney General's Office had established sufficient evidence to hold GMS Management, part of a nursing home chain, for trial on all charges in the deaths.

Federal officials said yesterday that the care at Cobbs Creek Nursing Home in Southwest Philadelphia is so bad they will stop paying for Medicare or Medicaid services there. This is expected to force the home, which has 205 patients, to close since most of its funding comes from Medicare or Medicaid. Federal payments will end on Feb. 5, according to a letter sent on Friday to Geriatric & Medical Centers Inc. of 5601 Chestnut St., the chain that operates Cobbs Creek and 30 other nursing homes in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Despite a week's worth of gruesome testimony about the death of an elderly woman in the Cobbs Creek Nursing Home, a Municipal Court judge yesterday ruled that there wasn't enough evidence to continue the involuntary manslaughter trial of two nursing home administrators. After the state rested its case yesterday morning, Municipal Judge J. Earl Simmons granted the request of defense attorneys Jack McMahon and Mark Gottlieb to dismiss the case against former nursing director Mary Bourgeois, 61, and former administrator Frank Dunion, 42. They were charged in connection with the death in September 1990 of nursing-home resident Elizabeth Ellis, 69, who lived at the home in Southwest Philadelphia since 1986 and who suffered from massive bedsores.

Conditions inside Danieal Kelly's home deteriorated sharply over five months in 2006 as the family's living conditions went from clean and orderly to chaotic and filthy, witnesses said yesterday. The slide culminated on Aug. 4, 2006, when photographs taken by the Philadelphia medical examiner show the 14-year-old with pencil-thin arms and legs, and the flesh on her back turned black by infection and bedsores. Her face is shrunken and wasted away. The images, recorded on the day of her death, were flashed on computer screens in U.S. District Court for only a brief moment, but they were sufficiently shocking to bring some jurors to tears.

In an highly unusual step for such a case, a Philadelphia jury yesterday leveled $5 million in punitive damages against Jeanes Hospital and a Wyncote nursing home in the death of a man who developed ultimately fatal bedsores while at both facilities. The damages - $1.5 million against Jeanes and $3.5 million against the Hillcrest Convalescent Home - came two weeks after the same Common Pleas Court jury awarded $1 million in compensatory damages in the case. The damages were awarded to the widow of Joe N. Blango, who died of bedsores in 2008, two years after being discharged from Jeanes Hospital in the city's Fox Chase section.

Conditions inside Danieal Kelly's home deteriorated sharply over five months in 2006 as the family's living conditions went from clean and orderly to chaotic and filthy, witnesses said yesterday. The slide culminated on Aug. 4, 2006, when photographs taken by the Philadelphia medical examiner show the 14-year-old with pencil-thin arms and legs, and the flesh on her back turned black by infection and bedsores. Her face is shrunken and wasted away. The images, recorded on the day of her death, were flashed on computer screens in U.S. District Court for only a brief moment, but they were sufficiently shocking to bring some jurors to tears.

MultiEthnic Behavior Services Inc. was supposed to make sure that 14-year-old Danieal Kelly, suffering from cerebral palsy and unable to walk, was receiving medical care and being well-fed at her home in West Philadelphia. Instead, Kelly was suffering from starvation, and the bedsores on her back were so severe in the weeks before her death in 2006 that anyone coming near the girl would have been shocked by the "disgusting" odor, said Cindy W. Christian, co-director of a children's health center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Arthur C. Evans offers the following story as evidence of how far the city agency responsible for abused and neglected children has come in just a few months. A social worker had little reason to suspect anything was amiss with one of her charges. Bandages on the child's bedsores were clean. She didn't complain of pain. But recent changes had led the troubled agency to hire two nurses for the first time. So the social worker asked one to come along on a home visit. The nurse peeled away a white bandage and peered at a bedsore.

High-octane Fiona Morrow - 20 years old, six feet tall and 100 percent verve - moves through the day on a lightning bolt, crackling through the homes of the elderly and the disabled she serves as a home health aide. "You're young, Miss Bessie," she caroled out. Bessie Cook, 72, smiled indulgently, wearily at Morrow. Morrow, of course, has no real idea what it's like to be arthritic and groaning all the way up the stairs, sleeping on a bed in the living room, worrying about diapers, and trying to make it to the commode chair a few feet away.

The daughter of a 90-year-old woman who died at the Montgomery County Geriatric and Rehabilitation Center in 1998 of complications from an infected bedsore, prompting a state probe of the facility, has filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit against the center and three of its directors at the time. The suit - filed in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia by Carol A. Mosser on behalf of her deceased mother, Florence Mosser - contends that the "negligence, carelessness and fault" of the Royersford center and its employees led to Mosser's death in November 1998.

The owner of two West Philadelphia nursing homes has agreed to pay $160,000 and cede control to a federally selected independent manager in order to settle government claims of substandard care for its residents. The settlement between the government and the corporate owner of the Mercy-Douglass Human Services Center, 4508 Chestnut St., and the Stephen Smith Home for the Aged, 4400 W. Girard Ave., was described in a consent agreement filed yesterday at the federal courthouse in Center City.

A lawsuit filed by the daughter of a woman whose death last year prompted a state probe into treatment practices at the Montgomery County Geriatric and Rehabilitation Center has been withdrawn, county officials announced yesterday. Commissioners Chairman Mario Mele said he was pleased at the news because he believed the withdrawal was a result of the plaintiff's realization that the lawsuit had "no basis. " But County Solicitor Tom Rogers cautioned that the lawsuit was withdrawn "with prejudice," which means that it can be renewed within two years of Florence Mosser's death, or up until November 2000.

A Burlington Township rehabilitation center for senior citizens is being sued by two women who claim negligence by the staff led to the premature death of their 68-year-old mother. Bolstering the lawsuit is a September 1996 Department of Health investigation that cited the Marcella Nursing and Rehabilitation Center for providing inadequate care for Marietta Shoemaker, a retired Mount Laurel cashier who suffered advanced lung cancer. Both the lawsuit, filed Monday in Camden County Superior Court, and the DOH report say that Shoemaker, the mother of four, suffered needlessly from bedsores and skin problems that were left untreated for the 2 1/2 weeks she stayed at Marcella.

Early this month, 83-year-old William Young was taken from his room at the Tucker House Nursing Home in North Philadelphia to the Hahnemann University Hospital emergency room. He was covered with more than 20 bedsores, and a strong, foul odor emanated from his wounds. One bedsore, on his right shoulder, was so large and deep that muscles, tendons and bones could be seen. Young was also dehydrated and malnourished. After examining Young, Hahnemann nurse specialist Linda Thomas was "outraged and horrified" at what she saw, according to an affidavit of probable cause filed by the state Attorney General's Office.