Texas Nursing Home Abuse
Family Wins $1.9 Million in Nursing Home Neglect Case
April 26, 2006
A Longview nursing home and a local college agreed to pay $1.9 million to the family of one a patient who died as a result of neglect.
Gertrude Wart, 76, suffered a stroke in January 2004 that left her partially paralyzed. Unable to balance or brace herself, doctors had ordered that she not be left alone unless the safety rails on her bed were up.
Several months later in April, Wart fell and struck her head after a nursing assistant student left her alone while she was sitting on the edge of the bed.
The nursing home failed to provide Wart with immediate treatment, telling her children that there was nothing to worry about. Wart entered a coma two days later and was transferred to St. John Medical Center where she died.
According to medical experts, Wart would have lived had she been taken to the hospital even a few hours earlier.
“There were so many violations of good care over the course of 48 hours by so many people. Up and down the chain, every nurse and nursing supervisor on shift, they all dropped the ball,” said Robert Gellatly, attorney for the family.
Three days after Wart died, the Department of Social and Health Services issued a jeopardy warning against the nursing home. A jeopardy finding, which requires the nursing home to stop accepting new patients, is the highest penalty available to the state short of closing the facility completely down.
The nursing home was forced to change its policies before it could be deemed in compliance with state and federal regulations.
Of the $1.9 million awarded in the settlement, Evergreen Frontier Rehabilitation and Extended Care Facility will pay $1.5 million. Lower Columbia College will pay the remainder since the nursing assistant who left Wart alone was a student there.
The family and their attorney said they are pleased with the verdict.
“What the community needs to take away from this is that nursing homes need to be closely monitored and that they need to be held accountable,” said Gellatly.
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