Nursing Home

Nearly half of all Americans older than 65 will spend some time in a nursing home, a statistic that overshadows the wish of most seniors to spend their final days in their real homes. The nursing-home stay may be for just a short while, or it could be longer if chronic health conditions dictate. Like it or not, it is that inevitability that makes the selection of a nursing home so important and difficult. One of the best tools available to help make a choice is Medicare's Web site, www.medicare.

One day last winter, Marion A. Torrence woke up in St. Joseph's Hospital on Girard Avenue, an apparent mugging victim. "They told me I was burned about the head and on the shoulder. They told me I'd been struck. I don't even remember. Someone brought me to the hospital, but I don't know who. " Torrence, 87, was living alone in her North Philadelphia home. For 43 years, she'd shared the house with her husband. But since his death 14 years ago, she'd been alone. "Unfortunately, we had no children," she said.

The owners of Tucker House, a financially ailing nursing home at 10th and Wallace Streets, plan to close the nine-year-old home next month unless they receive emergency relief. Tucker House spokesmen yesterday confirmed that they already had started to move patients to other nursing homes in the area, adding that they would continue to do so until all 181 patients had been relocated. "It's very unfortunate. Most of the patients and employees have been here nine years," said Paula Burroughs, the administrator of Tucker House.

The family of a 77-year-old woman yesterday sued a Philadelphia nursing home, alleging that the home illegally demanded more than $24,000 before it would admit her in 1984 and then discharged her without a hearing, violating her constitutional rights. Officials of the Golden Slipper Uptown Home for the Aged, at 7800 Bustleton Ave., contended that the woman, Jessie Eisenberg, is aggressive and a danger to the other residents of the 236-bed nursing home. To her family, Eisenberg is the victim of a system that demands illegal "up-front payments" before admitting people into a nursing home and then allows nursing-home operators to discharge residents without a hearing, in violation of their constitutional rights.

The General Accounting Office yesterday reported that the majority of private nursing-home insurance policies being sold have serious gaps, including policy restrictions and limitations designed to reduce benefits to consumers. The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, also said that a lack of standards and marketing requirements has increased the potential for abuses by unscrupulous salespeople and companies in the long-term-care market. Unlike the market for Medigap policies, which are sold to the elderly to provide medical care not covered by Medicare, there are no federal guidelines for policies that cover nursing-home or home-health care.

Suburban General Hospital in East Norriton Township has begun construction of a $7.5 million nursing home on its grounds to fill a need for nursing-home beds in Montgomery County. The home is expected to be the only skilled nursing facility affiliated with a hospital in the Norristown area, according to spokeswoman Cindy Forbes Raquet. Groundbreaking ceremonies were held yesterday. Bill Janssen, Suburban's vice president of finance, said the hospital, at 2701 DeKalb Pike, has never had a nursing home and "always thought it could finish off our total package.

Michael R. Walker's mission as head of Genesis Health Ventures, a nursing- home chain based in Kennett Square, is to eliminate society's stereotypical attitude toward nursing-home residents. His mission is not going unnoticed, not even by President Reagan. On Wednesday, the company received an award in Washington under a presidential program for private sector initiative. The award was given to the company in recognition of its innovative approach to bringing together the educational needs of nursing-home residents and of students looking for ways to practice their teaching skills.

Rugby Road in Haverford Township is the kind of place where neighbors borrow sugar, hold block parties, even take vacations together. "A lot of neighborhoods, it can be years before you get to know your neighbors," said Tad Sperry, who moved there two years ago. "I can walk down the street and talk to anybody. You get to be pretty good friends here. " But Sperry and others say that one homeowner on the block - state Rep. Richard A. McClatchy Jr. (R., Montgomery County) - has been less than neighborly.

Ida Ritthaler, at 86, and Frances Lieberman, at 90, are smiling more. They have been untied. The two residents of different Philadelphia nursing homes had been restrained to immovable objects for several years by well-meaning people who wanted to protect them. Their confinement was ironic. Traveling was in Ida Ritthaler's blood. Beginning in 1929, when she fled her depression-ridden home town in Germany's Black Forest, she had hopscotched the Atlantic, sometimes once a year.

At 27, Brenden D. Garozzo will be a spring chicken among some tougher birds as the administrator of Gloucester County's Shady Lane Nursing Home. Last week, the county Board of Freeholders appointed Garozzo, of East Greenwich Township, to the job of overseeing the 120-bed long-term-care home, which is the county government's largest unit. "I'm anxious to work with the residents and I'm anxious to work with the staff," Garozzo said. "I've heard nothing but good things about Shady Lane.

THE HOUSE at 5507 Locust St. in West Philadelphia was long the gathering place for the Tripp clan.The eight children of Margaret Frye Tripp and Melvin Donald Tripp would gather around the kitchen table and share their day's doings, their feelings, their problems, all in a spirit of family love and concern. The house itself was something of a miracle. Margaret bought it from wages earned as a housekeeper for other families. She was proud of her accomplishment, a tribute to her courage and determination, as well as her desire to be independent, never depending on the charity of others.

Just four of the 713 nursing homes regulated by the Pennsylvania Department of Health went three years with no state citations on annual health survey inspections, thereby qualifying for the department's new Award for Excellence in Health Care Compliance, the department said. The winners were Foulkeways at Gwynedd in Gwynedd, the Meadows at Shannondell in Audubon, the Schuylkill Center in Pottsville, and Pennsylvania Hospital Skilled Care Center in Philadelphia. All Pennsylvania nursing homes were automatically eligible for the award.

William Lawlis Pace, 103, who held the Guinness World Record for living the longest with a bullet in his head, died in his sleep Monday at a Turlock, Calif., nursing home. His death came 94 years and six months after his older brother accidentally shot him with their father's .22-caliber rifle in 1917. Mr. Pace learned in 2006 that he had been crowned the world record-holder in the category of unwanted cranial ammunition. His son told a newspaper during a birthday party for his father last year that doctors in Mr. Pace's native Texas left the bullet in place because they worried that surgery might cause brain damage.

WHEN A KNOCK on Jacqueline Carr Coleman's door long before daybreak Sunday woke her and her husband, they realized their daughter Tinesha never made it home from work the night before. "We thought she came home, but she didn't," Coleman said quietly Tuesday as she sat on her couch in their Wynnefield home. She was clutching a portrait of her smiling daughter in cap and gown. "I'm numbed," she murmured. "I want someone to pinch me so I can wake up from this bad dream. " The knock was from the police, who broke the news that Tinesha Carr, 33, a single mother of two young children, had been found dead of several gunshot wounds inside her Chrysler Sebring early that morning on 3rd Street near Annsbury in Feltonville.

Brittany Stevens doesn't talk a lot, but she's a bit of a social butterfly. She was a prom queen and, after a recent performance of the musical Fela! , she spontaneously hugged the dancers, nearly tackling them in excitement. But Brittany, 21, who is disabled and suffers from seizures, incontinence, hearing loss, and other problems, spends most of her days alone in her North Philadelphia home, while her mother, Harlena Morton, goes to work as a high-school counselor. Morton had hoped to find Brittany a job in a workshop that employs disabled adults.

A starving Polish jeweler liberated from a Nazi concentration camp by soldiers from Gen. George Patton's Third Army asked Pvt. Dave Kershaw whether he would like him to make duplicate "pre-engagement" rings from two U.S. silver dollars, one for himself and the other for his girlfriend in South Jersey. Her name would be on one side of each ring, his on the other. Kershaw, a native of Mount Ephraim who was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1944 and who survived the Battle of the Bulge, was thrilled by the jeweler's heartfelt gesture.

W. Va. fire kills 8 at slumber party CHARLESTON, W. Va. - Eight people, including a woman celebrating her 26th birthday and six young children at a family slumber party, died Saturday when fire tore through a two-story home while they slept, officials and witnesses said. A seventh child was on life support after the blaze, the deadliest in West Virginia's capital city in more than 60 years, Charleston Mayor Danny Jones said. The dead children ranged from 18 months to 8 years.

When a nursing home resident can no longer make decisions, someone else has to make the tough ethical choices. Should the patient's life be prolonged with a ventilator or feeding tube? Has the time come to remove life support? What would this person have wanted? The family and the nursing home staff can wind up at loggerheads, unable to take the next step. New Jersey's ethics committees are helping families and nursing home staff make these tough decisions. The regional panels are made up of trained volunteer professionals with diverse backgrounds, including nursing, social work, long-term care, and clergy.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - A nursing home where a 31-year-old man died after a meth lab fire that injured several other people was cited for 18 violations last year, including not providing adequate care, according to state records obtained Tuesday. The victim was not a patient or employee of Park Haven Home in Ashtabula, authorities said as they sought to uncover how the meth lab was set up in a resident's room and how long it went undetected. Police said charges were expected against two men who were also burned in the fire.