9 Georgia Nursing Homes Identified as Having a Persistent Record of Poor Care

Two United States Senators, one Republican and one Democrat, recently issued a report titled, “Families’ and Residents’ Right to Know: Uncovering Poor Care in America’s Nursing Homes”.  In it, the Senators note that a special program called Special Facility Focus (“SFF”) was created in 1998 to “increase oversight of facilities that persistently underperform in required inspections conducted by state survey agencies.” Under the law, the Centers for Medicare Services (CMS) determines which facilities are included on the SFF list, and how many are listed. Citing budget and staffing constraints, CMS is limited in putting 88 facilities on the list, and the names of those facilities are made public. However, an additional 400 facilities are candidates for the SFF list because they have a “persistent record of poor care” but are not on the list because of CMS’s limited resources. Those “candidates” for the SFF list are not made public, even though they are “indistinguishable from [SFF] participants in terms of their qualifications for enhanced oversight.”

Affected Nursing Homes

The Senators asked CMS to publish for the first time the list of facilities that were candidates, so that families researching nursing home facilities for their loved ones would have information about these substandard facilities. CMS complied, and the Senators have published that information. In Georgia, 9 facilities were on the SFF potentials list, they are:

• Northeast Atlanta Health and Rehabilitation Center,
• Pinehill Nursing Center,
• East Lake Arbor,
• Pleasant View Nursing Center,
• Westminster Commons,
• Brentwood Health and Rehabilitation,
• Pruitthealth – Blue Ridge,
• LaGrange Health and Rehab, and
• Clinch Healthcare Center.

The Senators also noted especially one incident of abuse and neglect in a Georgia nursing home, where a resident was able to climb out of her window and escaped, was later found on train tracks with a train approaching.

How the Warshauer Woodward Atkins Could Advocate for Victims

Our elderly and disabled citizens, some of the most fragile among us, deserve so much better care than what these notorious facilities are providing. At Warshauer Woodward Atkins, we have experience helping families determine whether their loved ones received substandard care at a nursing home facility, and if so, helping them recover maximum compensation for their loved one’s injuries.