The Dumont Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing Care has received 65 total citations over the four-year period between November 2013 and October 2017, according to the New York State Department of Health. With 65 citations, the nursing home and assisted living facility in Westchester County has almost twice the number of citations for the average nursing home in New York, which stands at 34 for the same time period. Perhaps more ominously, though, five of these citations were “related to actual harm or immediate jeopardy” – up from the average nursing home, which only had one of these kinds of citations.
Here are some of Dumont Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing Care’s most serious violations:
- Failure to provide care and services for residents to maintain the highest well-being possible. Per Section 483.25 of the Federal Code, each resident is legally entitled to receive the care and services necessary to “attain or maintain the highest practicable physical, mental, and psychosocial well-being.” The New York State Department of Health said that Dumont Center failed to meet this standard because it did not have “effective policies and procedures” to make sure all of the staff knew Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation, or CPR. Sadly, the government agency found that a resident who was found unresponsive was not treated with CPR by two nurses because they did not know how to perform CPR. The nursing home lacked documentation on the incident and failed to ensure that at least some of the nurses on staff that night were CPR-trained. The New York Department of Health not only ranked this as the “most severe” kind of citation but also described the problem of sub-standard care at the Westchester assisted living facility as “systematic and severe.”
- Failure to provide medically-related social services to maintain the highest well-being possible. Per Section 15(g) of the Federal Code, each resident is entitled to medically-related social services. In this specific instance, the assisted living facility and nursing home violated this regulation when the social workers “lacked care planning, proper identification, [and] discussion and coordination of Advanced Directives for its residents.” Similar to the previous citation, Dumont Center’s violation of this regulation resulted in harm to a resident who was not administered CPR in a timely manner. Further, there were apparently multiple residents who never received or who did not have updated Advanced Care Directives – which typically include directions on how the elderly patient wants to proceed with regards to his or her wishes on Do Not Resuscitate and Life-Sustaining Treatment, along with other Advanced Directives. Also, similar to the previous citation, the New York State Department of Health described Dumont Center’s treatment of its residents as a “systematic… substandard quality of care.”
- Violation of the Elderly Resident’s Right to Refuse Medical Treatment, Formulate Advance Directives. Per Section 483.10(b)(4) of the Federal Code, each resident has the right to “refuse treatment, to refuse to participate in experimental research, and to formulate an advanced directive.” By not making sure that each patient had Advanced Directives completed (and routinely updated), Dumont Center violated this regulation. After randomly checking 50 residents at the facility, the New York State Department of Health found that five of the residents did not have full Advanced Directives in effect. In some cases, the facility had not properly discussed or documented the Advanced Directive of these residents. However, the problem was more widespread – the facility did not have a system to “routinely check wristbands, the DNR list, and failed to ensure that staff were educated on facility policies” related to Advanced Directives.
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