Tuesday, April 30, 2002 | 10:58 a.m.
CARSON CITY -- Nursing homes in Nevada are understaffed, which leads to abuse and neglect of their senior citizen patients, a state commission was told Monday.
"I guarantee every facility has neglect and abuse in Las Vegas," Mark Morrow, founding partner of the Nursing Home Justice Center, said.
But the biggest problem, said Morrow, a Las Vegas attorney who handles senior abuse cases, is the lack of staff and in some cases a lack of training of nurses or aides to report cases of abuse or neglect.
Other speakers at the meeting of the Nevada Silver Haired Legislative Forum Monday agreed.
"Our staffing ratios (in long-term care homes) are not up to par (compared) to other states," Gilda Johnstone, chief of elder rights for the state Aging Services Division, said.
Nevada has no regulation on the number of staff members who should be assigned in a nursing home. In Nevada, registered nurses in long-term care homes average 1.1 hours spent per day with each patient. In California, patients receive 3.2 hours of attention per day. In Arizona, it's 2.5 hours.
But Nevada is still slightly better than the national average, Morrow said. Medicare statistics showed the number of hours per registered nurse per resident per day in the nation averages one hour, he said.
Morrow presented Medicare statistics that showed some nursing homes in Las Vegas were well below the national and state average:
Members of the forum said they would seek either a law or a regulation setting a nurse-to-patient ratio.
Last year there were 2,778 reports of elder abuse reported to the state Aging Services Division.
Those cases were reported among the state's 4,865 beds in 42 long-term care centers. About 700 of those beds were vacant in March.
Nurse assistants are not trained to make reports, Sandie Durgin, supervisor of the abuse and neglect detail of the Metro Police Department, said, and nurses are ostracized by administrators when they file them.
Her unit, she said, tries to train the nurses and social workers in reporting abuse.
Last week her unit closed a group care home in Las Vegas that had up to nine patients, she told the group. It had been operating for four years without a license, but a social worker had been referring patients to the home. "The bottom line is she looked the other way," Durgin said.
Others said nursing home administrators don't want to hear about complaints, and the attorney general and district attorney turn a deaf ear.
Alice Adams, a member of the Silver Haired Forum, said when she reported abuses the 10 years she worked in a nursing home, "I went to the Attorney General's Office and I got no help."
"They (the administrators of the homes) pounded me and I had to quit," Adams said.
Virgil Getto, a member of the forum, asked Morrow whether increasing the staff-to-patient ratio would raise the cost of nursing homes. Morrow said it would get more expensive to provide better care, but the alternative is to neglect patients.
Morrow said he took his mother-in-law out of a Las Vegas home and sent her to Wyoming, where she receives better care.
Durgin also told the forum there were a "large number" of unlicensed homes that care for one or two elderly. "We've gone to the Legislature a number of time," in an attempt to get a law change, she said.
"They ought to have a license," she said.
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