Kentucky: Nursing home with 4 dead erred by bringing infected workers back, lawmaker says.

BY JOHN CHEVES

APRIL 20, 2020 05:31 PM, UPDATED APRIL 20, 2020 08:09 PM

The Jackson County nursing home that is one of Kentucky’s hot spots in the novel coronavirus pandemic, with 35 residents sickened and four residents dead, brought infected employees back to work too quickly and without proper precautions, a state lawmaker said Monday.

State Rep. Robert Goforth, R-East Bernstadt, said several employees of Signature HealthCARE at Jackson Manor have texted him to say they were ordered back on the job even before they finished showing coronavirus symptoms, such as a fever. Public health officials say at least 19 employees of the facility have tested positive since April 6, and at least 10 since have recovered.

“I understand that they’re short-staffed out there, but this is pure negligence,” Goforth said.

“No one should fear losing their job because they don’t want to come back to work while they’re still sick and they’re at risk of killing one or more of their patients,” he said. “This virus is running rampant through there. It is not slowing down.”

Jackson Manor’s administrator did not return a call Monday seeking comment.

Neither did a spokeswoman for its corporate owner, Louisville-based Signature HealthCARE, the largest nursing home chain in Kentucky, with about 40 facilities across the state. A former high-ranking Signature HealthCARE executive serves in Gov. Andy Beshear’s administration as a health care industry regulator.

Jackson Manor is rated a one-star facility — or “much below average” — by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, ranking it among the nation’s worst even before the pandemic.

In 2019 alone, Jackson Manor was cited 11 times, twice the statewide average, with multiple violations of infection prevention and control standards meant to protect residents from disease. These included inadequate hand washing by staff and residents; failure to remove gloves soiled by feces before touching a patient; and carrying a medicine container from an infectious patient’s room and placing it onto a medications cart circulating around the nursing home, according to state inspection reports.

Inspectors said Jackson Manor also failed to have enough staff on duty to properly care for its residents. In one episode in February 2019, a resident fell and broke his elbow because his care plan was not followed. The facility was fined more than $10,000. In another case, a resident’s colostomy bag burst open, creating a mess, after harried nurse aides did not respond to his calls for help.

As of Monday, the 51-bed facility held 31 infected residents, with four more hospitalized with the coronavirus and four dead from it. The latest fatality, reported Monday, was a 52-year-old man, according to local health officials.

Goforth, who represents Jackson County in the Kentucky House of Representatives, said he’s been communicating in recent days with Jackson Manor employees. Goforth said several of the employees say they tested positive for the virus and explained to the facility’s administrators that they still were symptomatic, but they nonetheless were ordered back to work.

“I’ve been extremely disappointed,” Goforth said. “I’ve expressed my concerns to the health department, to the governor’s office, to the (Kentucky Health and Family Services) Cabinet, telling them they need to step in and take better control of this situation.”

Jeff Lakes has a mother-in-law who lives in Jackson Manor and a friend who works there. On Monday, he said he’s horrified by how quickly the deadly virus spread through a facility that was ordered closed to the outside world other than the daily flux of employees. Lakes said he knows of at least three employees who tested positive for the virus but returned to work only a week later.

“When they went on lock-down four or five weeks ago and said we couldn’t visit family out there anymore to prevent the possible spread of infection, you know, that was rough on us, but we supported it,” Lakes said. “We didn’t want to bring (the coronavirus) in there. But then the first people who tested positive out there were the employees.”

Jackson Manor’s first positive case was a physical therapy assistant from another county who is presently hospitalized at the University of Kentucky and not doing well, said Christie Green, public health director for the Cumberland Valley District Health Department.

But the fact that the therapist tested positive first does not necessarily mean he was the first person connected to Jackson Manor to be infected, or that he was the person who introduced the virus to the facility, Green said.

“The coronavirus is much more infectious then the flu and other illnesses that we typically deal with, so I would strongly caution individuals against making a conclusion on how this happened,” she said.

As for infected Jackson Manor employees returning to work, Green said the preferred protocol in such cases is for two negative test results from nasopharyngeal swabs taken more than 24 hours apart, to confirm workers no longer carry the virus. But such testing has not been available in the area yet, she said. Gravity Diagnostics should be making that service available shortly, she added.

“We are planning to implement that right away once we can,” Green said.

For now, Green said, with testing not yet widely available, the health department is telling Jackson Manor and other health care facilities to follow Centers for Disease Control guidelines that recommend having their recovering workers wait at least three days once they are symptom-free without the aid of medication.

Jackson Manor also has taken the step of assigning formerly infected employees to work only with infected residents in an isolated part of the facility, to minimize the chances of anyone else getting sickened, Green said.

However, Lakes said the body count has grown too high for anyone to explain to his satisfaction.

“They went, in about four weeks, from locking this place down to having one staff member infected to, today, having over 40 people infected,” Lakes said. “The state, the CDC, the health department, they all dropped the ball big-time. No one will ever convince me otherwise.”

John Cheves is a government accountability reporter at the Lexington Herald-Leader. He joined the newspaper in 1997 and previously worked in its Washington and Frankfort bureaus and covered the courthouse beat.

Why do some nursing homes have horrible COVID19 outbreaks while others have very little or none? Proper staffing and proper infection control saves lives. If your loved one died in a nursing home because of COVID-19, please contact us. 1-800-645-5262

Source: https://www.kentucky.com/news/health-and-medicine/article242147101.html