Evergreen Milton-Freewater Health and Rehabilitation Center and the corporation that manages it, Evergreen Healthcare Management, are the focus of a wrongful death lawsuit seeking $7.5 million in punitive damages. But the case will have to wait five more months before going to a jury trial.
Barbara Dickerson of Milton-Freewater filed the lawsuit almost three years ago, accusing the Milton-Freewater nursing home and the management company of neglecting her late mother, Alice Train. That neglected, the lawsuit claims, contributed to her death.
In addition to the punitive damages, Dickerson is suing for about $36,000 in medical costs related to her mother, another $500,000 for wrongful death and $750,000 for her mother’s pain and suffering.
The lawsuit claims Dickerson and her family put their 90-year-old mother into the Milton-Freewater nursing home on March 12, 2005, because she was suffering from dementia. Train had diabetes, but she could walk and had no injuries.
But in 49 days at Evergreen Milton-Freewater, the lawsuit said, Train lost the ability to walk on her own, dropped from 152 pounds to 136, suffered from her limbs contracting and developed a pressure ulcer in her coccygeal area that was rotting to the bone and required surgery to cut away dead tissue. Train also developed pneumonia and anemia, according to court documents for the plaintiff, and the nursing home staff didn’t regularly monitor her blood sugar levels.
Dickerson moved her mother from Evergreen to another facility, but the lawsuit said the neglect Train suffered at Evergreen contributed to her death on June 30, 2005.
Dickerson initially filed the lawsuit in January 2007. Last week, it looked like a jury was finally going to consider the case in a six-day trial starting Monday. But the management company said it needed two days more to give a proper defense. Circuit Court Judge Christopher Brauer granted that request, but lengthening the trial to eight days also meant delaying it until April 19, 2010.
The East Oregonian wasn’t able to reach Dickerson, but her Pendleton attorney, Brian Dretke, spoke about the case. He said he understands the court’s ruling, but this is frustrating for him and the family.
“Every time we get ready to go to another trial, it’s like going through it again,” he said.
Dretke said Dickerson cared for her mother until her dementia proved too much to handle. The family chose the Evergreen facility, he said, because it would allow them to visit every week.
According to court documents, it was during a visit that Dickerson saw the neglect.
“On April 21, 2005, Barb visited and found her mother sitting in a wheelchair soaked in her own urine,” court papers said. “It was dripping on the floor in a puddle underneath the wheelchair. The smell of ammonia from the urine was so strong it made Alice cough.”
Dickerson complained about her mother’s condition, the lawsuit said, and she also discovered no one had bathed her mother in seven days. Dickerson then returned a week later. While changing her mother’s diaper, she found a wound under a dressing.
“She removed the strip,” papers said, “and discovered a wound that contained necrotic (dead) tissue and exuded a putrid odor.”
The next day, Train went to the emergency room at St. Mary Medical Center in Walla Walla, where doctors diagnosed her as having right lower lobe pneumonia, anemia and an infected coccygeal ulcer that went all the way to bone.
Medical Web sites about these kinds of ulcers say they can be life-threatening, especially without proper treatment, and they can be so severe as to require a specialist.
The lawsuit alleges the nursing home staff and supervisors not only didn’t recognize how severe the ulcer was, they also failed to bring in anyone else who could.
Jane Boren is a registered nurse in Eugene. She reviewed the case for the plaintiffs. The declaration of her findings is a public record that said allowing Train’s skin to be “dirty and wet with urine very likely promoted the formation” of the ulcer.
“Moreover,” she said, “the facility failed to provide adequate feeding and meal supplementation for Alice Train and did not appropriately monitor her blood glucose levels. … The facility did not provide appropriate equipment and did not provide appropriate positional changes for Alice Train as her condition deteriorated.”
Boren also found substandard care seemed to be a lingering problem at the facility from about 2004-2006. She cited the findings of several Oregon Department of Human Services investigations and surveys that show the facility and its staff were failing to properly care for residents.
In fact, Dretke said, in the six to eight months after Train’s death, the state came close to pulling Evergreen’s license because it had “so many failed surveys in which residents suffered harm.”
The state stopped short of that action after the nursing home and the management company agreed on Oct. 17, 2006, to bring in an independent consultant to implement a plan so the facility could meet state and federal licensing requirements.
Dretke said those failed surveys and are part of the basis for the $7.5 million punitive claim, as is the fact Evergreen Healthcare Management is a large corporation that operates 46 nursing facilities and four assisted living facilities in California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Washington, according to information on its own Web site.
The EO left messages for Jason Smith, general counsel to Evergreen Healthcare Management, which has headquarters in Vancouver, Wash. Smith didn’t return phone calls. Also, according to online business registration information, Evergreen Milton-Freewater has yet to renew its Oregon business license this year.
Some of Evergreen Healthcare Management’s other nursing homes also have had troubles. The federal agency Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has named Evergreen nursing homes on its “special focus facilities” list. The CMMS randomly inspects facilities on the special focus facilities list twice a year instead of once. Evergreen’s center in The Dalles was a “special focus facility” for 19 months, but is improving, according to the latest CMMS report. Evergreen nursing homes in Phoenix, Ariz., Centralia, Wash., Livingston and Missoula, Mont., Carson City, Nev., and Seattle, also have been “special focus” facilities in recent years.
Dretke said in spite of what the dollar figures look like, this lawsuit isn’t about the money. The Dickerson family, he said, wants to make sure other families don’t have to go through this experience.
The attorneys at the Kornfeld law firm have experience dealing with wrongful death lawsuits. Contact our Washington wrongful death attorneys for a free consultations.
