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The first call for help from the sweltering nursing home came at 3 a.m. Wednesday: a patient in cardiac arrest. An hour later came the second call, a patient struggling to breathe. Only with the third call did rescue officials begin to realize the gravity of the situation.
Rescue workers found three dead people on the second floor of the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills. By the end of the day, five more were dead, all of them vulnerable elderly, ranging in age from 71 to 99.
Police have launched a criminal investigation into the deaths, blamed on the stifling heat inside the nursing home, which lost power and air conditioning Sunday during Hurricane Irma. In question are the actions taken to protect nursing home residents from the escalating heat.
This is a tragedy, but why do old people insist on retiring to a disaster-prone tropical-heat hell-hole like Florida? Their kids are always living elsewhere which makes helping them difficult.
This is a tragedy, but why do old people insist on retiring to a disaster-prone tropical-heat hell-hole like Florida? Their kids are always living elsewhere which makes helping them difficult.
They may not be transplants from up north. They might not have had any choice where they were going to end up. Not everyone has the luxury of choices. My question is, if hospitals have back-up power sources, why don't nursing/assisted living homes have them as well (the old bottom line perhaps). Nursing homes aren't much different than hospitals on the patient vulnerability scale. I would think state regulations would require them to have some sort of emergency power system. Maybe if this happens often enough, the Tombstone Factor will kick in, and something will get done about it.
this Home had an emergency generator but it had been ignored and failed to work. Just think how much the home's profits were enhanced by failing to do this maintenance.
Evidently the power was back on in the elder care center but a fuse was blown in the AC unit.
It's still summer down here. Our temps yesterday were in the 90s.
My friend is doing an investigative piece for the Miami Herald about elder care abuse in South Florida because it is a thing. This tragedy yesterday got the go ahead from her editor.
They may not be transplants from up north. They might not have had any choice where they were going to end up. Not everyone has the luxury of choices. My question is, if hospitals have back-up power sources, why don't nursing/assisted living homes have them as well (the old bottom line perhaps). Nursing homes aren't much different than hospitals on the patient vulnerability scale. I would think state regulations would require them to have some sort of emergency power system. Maybe if this happens often enough, the Tombstone Factor will kick in, and something will get done about it.
The lack of effective regulation in nursing homes in states like Florida and Arizona and Texas is a direct result of Reagan-esque "starve the beast" mentality. The old farts have an allergic reaction to paying for anything & so they get the government they pay for and quite frankly deserve. The "low tax" places these folks retire to also have no social safety net. No unemployment insurance, no "welfare", no state OSHA "interference", no pesky environmental agencies & no one actually looking over nursing homes to see that they're staffed & maintained at a level fit for human habitation.
Dreams do come true & these incidents aren't accidents, they're what happens when you don't want to pay for long term care or have any government regulation of healthcare. Instead of elected representatives deciding what appropriate health care looks like, ceo's of for-profit companies do. This is what a corporate "death panel" thinks is cool.
I guess there are no windows to open in buildings anymore these days. How needlessly tragic! Old folks are quite vulnerable to heat....
Open windows?! How were they supposed to get out of bed in the middle of the night to do that, if they were hooked up to a respirator, or whatever? WHERE WERE THE STAFF??!! Do nursing home staff in Florida routinely abandon their charges all night? Does everyone assume they'll just magically be ok? Anything can happen in the middle of the night, hurricane or no hurricane. Why were they unsupervised? No nurse working the night shift? Really? A resident who encounters difficulty at 3 a.m. is supposed to call the police, instead of the facility's staff? No one on call?
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