Petaluma Nursing Facility Sued for Elder Abuse, Neglect

The family of a 90-year-old Petaluma woman is suing a local nursing care facility on charges of that she was denied appropriate care and neglected on a repeated basis, so much so that just month later she was sent to the emergency room with an infection she developed while at the facility.

According to the suit, filed Sept. 21 in Sonoma County Superior Court, the woman was admitted to , a skilled nursing facility located at 300 Douglas St. In her short time at the home, the staff “repeatedly failed to perform basic wound monitoring, nutrition and hydration,” according to the suit, so that the woman’s ulcer condition worsened.

The nursing staff at the 98-bed facility engaged in elder abuse and reckless neglect by not carrying out basic treatments and assessments and by failing to develop and follow a nursing care plan for the patient, said Audrey Gerard, the family’s attorney.

“When my client was evaluating the facility for her mother, she was given documents that described the home as having experts in wound care, but while she was there wounds became huge and infected,” Gerard said. “The wound was so bad that she had to be taken to Petaluma Valley Hospital, which made a report with the Sonoma County ombudsman's office.”

Petaluma Health and Rehabilitation is owned by Evergreen Healthcare, which operates nursing homes throughout California, Oregon and Washington. A call to Evergreen’s corporate offices was not returned Wednesday or Thursday. But according to California’s Health Facilities Consumer Information System, the Petaluma facility has received dozens of complaints in recent years, most of them substantiated. These include complaints about not properly hydrating patients, not doing enough to prevent accidents and not providing proper diets.

A comparison of Petaluma Health and Rehabilitation with other California nursing facilities showed that PHR spent less licensed staff hours per patient than many other facilities in the state. For example, while the average California nursing home spent one and a half hours per a day per patient, PHR spent under an hour, according to Medicare.gov.

“Elder abuse comes in all forms,” said Gerard, the attorney. “It can be financial, it can be physical and it can be neglect by not providing proper care.”