By Sandy Kleffman
Contra Costa Times
Many reporters reject doing nursing home investigations because they assume all the best stories have already been done.
But serious problems remain and many untold stories exist in institutions that serve some of the most vulnerable members of our society, said speakers at Health Journalism 2010 in Chicago.
"Nursing homes never really change, and you have to ask why," said Trudy Lieberman, moderator of the "Investigating Nursing Homes" panel and a contributing editor/columnist for Columbia Journalism Review.
"I think it's because we do not value the elderly in our country," Lieberman said.
Chicago Tribune reporter David Jackson said the three-part series on nursing homes he did last year with colleague Gary Marx was a very gratifying experience.
The story began when the two reporters decided to look deeper into a news brief about a 21-year-old psychiatric patient who had been charged with raping a 69-year-old woman in a suburban nursing home. They were startled that such a young man had been placed in a retirement home.
Their series, titled "Compromised Care," revealed that Illinois relies on nursing homes to house younger adults with mental illness, including thousands of gang members and felons.
After filing more than 100 Freedom of Information Act requests, Jackson and Marx uncovered numerous cases in which poorly screened nursing home residents assaulted, raped and even murdered their elderly and disabled housemates.
The stories prompted an immediate response. Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn appointed a nursing home safety task force, which held public hearings and made 38 recommendations aimed at better protecting residents. If adopted, those changes should improve safety and save lives, Jackson said.
"What we did is kick open the door," he said. "To have been a part of that is one of the most important things that has ever happened to me."
Jackson and Marx requested police reports on incidents occurring in nursing homes and compared those with regulatory reports from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. They discovered that such government agencies were not communicating with each other.
To get inside the nursing homes, they wrote letters to residents identified by voter registration rolls and other means. Once they found someone willing to talk, they asked the resident to invite them inside the home.
Not only do nursing homes need close scrutiny, but so do residential care and assisted living facilities, which are attracting increasing numbers of seniors, said Patricia McGinnis, executive director of California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform. These institutions are subject to state rather than federal laws, and many states have minimal regulations, she said.
McGinnis provided journalists with a list of story ideas, including investigating who owns residential care and assisted living facilities in your state, looking at why fines against nursing homes aren't collected, analyzing the use of drugs in nursing homes and who is profiting, and exploring elder financial abuse.
The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services plans to upgrade its Nursing Home Compare website at www.medicare.gov within the next couple of years, said Edward Mortimore, technical director of the CMS survey and certification group. Changes will include adding data about civil penalties, and staffing information that is payroll-based, which should be more reliable, he said.
