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.

Smoking, littering, and wildly driving students are terrorizing the residents of a nursing home across from Downingtown High School, according to the facility's top administrator. "We have elderly people here who get frightened at the students' behavior," said Colleen Frankenfield, head administrator of St. Martha Manor, a 120-bed long-term-care facility. "To be honest, we're concerned somebody here is going to get hurt. " Frankenfield said students distressed residents and their elderly visitors by gathering in the nursing-home parking lot to smoke and hang out before and after school.

The nuns of the Immaculate Heart of Mary have taught generations of children in the Philadelphia area. And when they were too frail or sick to work they retired to Camilla Hall, an austere nursing home on the campus of Immaculata College in Malvern. Lately, the sisters have been retiring in droves. Almost a quarter of the order's 822 nuns live at Camilla Hall and that number is expected to grow over the next decade. "Our median age is 72," said Sister Anne Veronica, administrator of the nursing home.

After 105 years, it can be tough to pick out a birthday present. But officials at the New Jersey Veterans Memorial Home in Vineland knew exactly what to get Frank Cuccia on Saturday. "The reason he says he's gotten to be 105 is because every day he would always eat a McDonald's hamburger," said Derick Glenn, special events coordinator at the home. So a Happy Meal it was. While the gift may have been small, there was still a big celebration for the World War II veteran, as the nursing home and local VFWs honored residents there for their service as part of National Nursing Home Week.

If nuns can fly, can a rabbi be a talk-show host? WWDB-AM (860) radio is betting that Richard Address, senior clergy at Cherry Hill's M'Kor Shalom, has the chops to attract a coveted audience: baby boomers. And not just the Jewish ones. (Address goes by Richard on the program.) Boomer Generation Radio , which debuted in February, aims to address the unique concerns of the 76 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964. The first wave is already careening through their mid-60s, joining Medicare, maybe applying for Social Security - all the while caring for their children, possibly looking after grandchildren, and, more often than not, taking care of an elderly parent.

The cost of caring for dementia patients has reached $109 billion annually, exceeding that for heart disease and cancer, and will double by the time the youngest baby boomers reach their 70s, according to a study. Dementia is characterized by a group of symptoms that prevent people from carrying out the tasks of daily living. Reduced mental function makes it impossible for them to do things like keep track of medications or finances. In more severe cases, patients lose the ability to handle basic tasks like bathing and dressing.

Selma Kron, 81, a former Horsham resident who with her husband built a foundering business in Ambler into a successful nursing home, died Sunday, Jan. 13, in Clearwater, Fla., where she had lived since the 1990s. She was diagnosed in April with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive neurodegenerative disease. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Mrs. Kron graduated from West Philadelphia High School, then graduated with a bachelor's degree in education from the University of Pennsylvania in 1953.

The Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare this month launched an unprecedented Medicaid audit at 75 nursing homes in Southeastern Pennsylvania as part of a campaign to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse. Industry executives and others, who say long-term care centers already undergo frequent audits, said they were not worried about the possible discovery of expensive errors. But they dread the logistics of preparing four years of Medicaid billing records for 100 percent review - while puzzling over how much money the DPW expects to recover from improper bills.

Cathedral Village, a retirement community in Philadelphia's Andorra section, last month reached what experts called a "unique" agreement with the U.S. Attorney's Office in Philadelphia to enhance care in its nursing home, especially for Alzheimer's and dementia patients. The joint agreement grew out of complaints by Barry Vernick, whose wife, suffering from Parkinson's disease and dementia, died following a brief stay at Cathedral Village in late 2008. The agreement mentions no allegations of wrongdoing by the nonprofit Cathedral Village.

A Philadelphia nonprofit with ties to State Rep. Dwight Evans mismanaged $1.5 million in state grants since 2006, raising questions about how the money was obtained and spent, according to a confidential state audit. At Evans' direction, the Urban Affairs Coalition put a Philadelphia pastor and his aide on its payroll, the auditors found, then used taxpayer funds to pay them $365,000 for work that auditors said they could not verify. The grants included $1 million that went to renovate a nursing home run by Leland Beloff, a former Philadelphia city councilman who was convicted in an extortion scheme in 1987 with mob boss Nicodemo Scarfo.

The sale of Burlington County's 100-year-old nursing home for the poor has become a major issue in the race for two seats on the five-member Board of Freeholders. Incumbents Bruce Garganio and Mary Ann O'Brien voted in March with the all-Republican board to sell Buttonwood Hospital despite the pleas of hundreds of workers, patient advocates, and county residents who attended two hearings. Their Democratic challengers, Aimee Belgard and Joanne Schwartz, said in a recent debate, as they have on the campaign trail, that the auction of the county-run hospital to a lone bidder for $15 million was undertaken as "a quick fix" to fill a deficit in the county's $199 million budget.

As the battle over Pennsylvania's controversial voter-ID law heads back to court, Montgomery County's Democratic-controlled government lobbed its own grenade into the partisan fracas Thursday. Starting next month, the county will issue its own poll-ready photo IDs to registered voters through a county-run nursing home, the commissioners announced. The plan exploits a loophole in the law that allows colleges and government-managed care facilities to issue identification cards to anyone, not just those who work, attend classes, or reside there.