On a chilly afternoon in April, Los Angeles police found an old, disoriented man crumpled on a Koreatown sidewalk.
Several days earlier, RC Kendrick, an 88-year-old with dementia, was living at Lakeview Terrace, a nursing home with a history of regulatory problems. His family had placed him there to make sure he got round-the-clock care after his condition deteriorated and he began disappearing for days at a time.
But on April 6, the nursing home deposited Mr. Kendrick at an unregulated boardinghouse — without bothering to inform his family. Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Kendrick was wandering the city alone.
According to three Lakeview employees, Mr. Kendrick’s ouster came as the nursing home was telling staff members to try to clear out less-profitable residents to make room for a new class of customers who would generate more revenue: patients with Covid-19.
More than any other institution in America, nursing homes have come to symbolize the deadly destruction of the coronavirus crisis. […]
That’s obscene. And I know it can happen.
In 2015 my mother, who was in her 90’s in a nursing home, developed CDIFF, an infectious disease that many elderly get. I was informed that they were sending her to the hospital, and at the same time evicting her immediatly from her nursing home. She was in the hospital about a week, and was sent to a rehabilitation center. There she became worse, and we thought that she was critical. Then the rehab center informed me that she had to leave, because it was for rehab, not for people who were dying, that was the regulation. I called Hospice and learned that she could go there for a week, but after that she had to leave if she didn’t manage to die by that time. I didn’t have a place to put her as I share a small apartment with a roomate, leaving me with the only option of taking my mother to a motel.
Fortunately, I became very angry and screamed a lot and finally found a sympathetic, overworked nurse, who sent her back to the hospital as the only thing she could do. And I was able to finally find a small nursing care home that would take her while she was in hospital. She recovered there, lived for another 3 months, and died peacefully. I shudder to think what it would be like for people who do not have aggressive advocates such as I was for my mother.