CDPH Cites Three Nursing Homes
The California Department of Public Health fined three Northern California skilled nursing facilities a total of $200,000 for lapses in care that led to patient deaths.
Two of the facilities are operated by skilled nursing chains, while the third is operated by O'Connor Hospital in San Jose. All received AA citations, which are the most serious CDPH can issue.
John Kronstadt Convalescent Center in Castro Valley was fined $60,000 for a patient who choked on a hot dog while attending a baseball game in 2012. The patient later died in the intensive care unit of a nearby hospital. He was only supposed to have soft foods due to a choking danger, but such orders weren't given to employees when they accompanied patients outside of the facility. The SNF is operated by Meridian Foresight, which operates a number of nursing homes in Northern California.
Kindred Transitional Care was fined $75,000 for a 2010 incident at its Bay View facility in Alameda. An opening for a patient's dialysis shunt was not properly attended to, leading to the patient bleeding to death in his bed. A registered nurse assigned to the patient had not been properly trained in the care of dialysis patients, and did not appear at sessions to do so, according to CDPH records. The SNF is operated by Kindred Healthcare, a national nursing home chain.
The O'Connor Hospital skilled nursing facility in San Jose was fined $65,000 for a 2012 incident where a respiratory therapist providing care to a patient with a degenerative nervous system disease forgot to turn on the patient's ventilator after cleaning out his tracheostomy equipment. The non-responsive patient was discovered by another SNF employee about 15 minutes later.
The number of nursing facilities cited by CDPH in 2013 doubled to six with the three issued last week. It fined five facilities in all of 2012, and has not issued citations to multiple facilities in more than a year.
A CDPH spokesperson said the issuance of the citations was coincidental, but was unable to immeditely say if the agency was ramping up SNF enforcement activity.
