|
E-mail this page to a friend!
Deaths at St. Rita's Dramatically Show Risk for
Nursing Homes
Sept. 14, 2005 We have known for days that 34
people died in St. Ritas Nursing Home in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana,
and now the owners have been charged with negligent homicide. There are,
however, conflicting stories of why this happened at a nursing home that
most agree had a good reputation of carrying for the elderly patients.
The owners, Salvador A. Mangano and Mable Mangano,
went to Baton Rouge yesterday and turned themselves in to face the
charges.
| |
What Others Are Saying |
|
| |
Editorial: St. Louis Post-Dispatch
In a city where the dead lay
decomposing on the street for nearly two weeks, the discovery of
45 bodies in a flooded hospital still comes as a gruesome shock.
What really happened at New
Orleans' Memorial Medical Center is as murky as the dark waters
that rolled through the city. Administrators say many of the 45
died in the sweltering hospital in the days after the storm,
when electricity and medical supplies dwindled and hopes of
rescue disappeared. State officials say at least 115 patients
were in the hospital the day after the storm. Prosecutors are
investigating.
On the same day those 45 bodies
were finally recovered, state officials launched an
investigation into the deaths of patients at St. Rita's Nursing
Home in nearby St. Bernard Parish...
What really happened at St.
Rita's and at Memorial Medical Center? The answers to those
painful questions - and to the many others raised by the botched
response to Katrina - will come in time.
Meanwhile, we are left to imagine
the unimaginable last hours of the old and the sick, sitting in
wheelchairs or slumped on beds, waiting in the heat and darkness
for food, water and medicine, waiting for deliverance from the
swirling black water, abandoned by everyone save their maker. |
|
At a news conference, Attorney General Charles C.
Foti, said Thirty-four people drowned in a nursing home when it should
have been evacuated.''
They didn't follow the standard of care of what a
reasonable person would follow, Foti said.
St. Rita's had an evacuation plan for its 60
residents before Hurricane Katrina struck on Aug. 29. The couple failed
to evacuate the elderly residents though they were required to do so,
according to Foti.
He confirmed that 34 bodies have been recovered
all patients. There have not been autopsies.
St. Rita's didn't evacuate the one-story home
because the owners didn't receive a mandatory evacuation notice from St.
Bernard Parish and thought they'd be risking patient lives by moving
them voluntarily, CNN reported, citing Jim Cobb, attorney for the
owners.
Patients on oxygen and feeder tubes ``won't survive
the evacuation if you pull that trigger too soon,'' Cobb said on CNN.
``They saved over 52 lives after the water rose precipitously. They
abandoned no one.''
St. Bernard Parish coroner Bryan Bertucci told
reporters that he called nursing home owner Mable Mangano during a
Parish Council meeting on Aug. 28, a day before the storm. He said he
asked her why she hadn't followed the evacuation plan she filed with the
parish and removed her patients to Baton Rouge and Lafayette on the two
buses set aside for them.
``The sad thing is that these people ran a pretty
good nursing home,'' St. Bernard Parish Fire Chief Thomas Stone said on
CNN. The owners ``just made one mistake.''
The staff at St. Rita's managed to save 20 patients
by floating them on mattresses across a half-mile of floodwater to
nearby Beauregard High School as the water level rose, Raymond Couture,
one of the rescuers, said last week.
One died on the way, two died there, and a fourth
died afterward in the hospital, he said.
St. Bernard Parish is a retirement community about
six miles east of downtown New Orleans. It had 67,000 residents before
the storm.
Parts of this news story from Bloomberg News
Click Here
| A
Fatal Incuriosity |
|
By
Maureen Dowd, New York Times Columnist
I hate
spending time in hospitals and nursing homes. I find them to
be some of the most depressing places on earth.
Maybe
that's why the stories of the sick and elderly who died, 45
in a New Orleans hospital and 34 in St. Rita's nursing home
in the devastated St. Bernard Parish outside New Orleans,
haunt me so
Given
that the Bush team has dealt with both gulf crises, Iraq and
Katrina, with the same deadly mixture of arrogance and
incompetence, and a refusal to face reality, it's
frightening to think how it will handle the most demanding
act of government domestic investment since the New Deal.
Even
though we know W. likes to be in his bubble with his feather
pillow, the stories this week are breathtaking about the
lengths the White House staff had to go to in order to
capture Incurious George's attention.
Newsweek reported that the reality of Katrina did not
sink in for the president until days after the levees broke,
turning New Orleans into a watery grave. It took a virtual
intervention of his top aides to make W. watch the news
about the worst natural disaster in a century. Dan Bartlett
made a DVD of newscasts on the hurricane to show the
president on Friday morning as he flew down to the Gulf
Coast.
The
aides were scared to tell the isolated president that he
should cut short his vacation by a couple of days, Newsweek
said, because he can be "cold and snappish in private."
W.
has said he prefers to get his information straight up from
aides, rather than filtered through newspapers or newscasts.
But he surrounds himself with weak sisters who don't have
the nerve to break bad news to him, or ideologues with
agendas that require warping reality or chuckleheaded
cronies like Brownie.
The
president should stop haunting New Orleans, looking for that
bullhorn moment. It's too late.
For the full column, click here. N.Y. Times requires a
free registration. |
|
Nursing Home Abuse, Medical Malpractice? Contact a lawyer.
click here
|
|
