TOPEKA — Nursing home administrator Greta Wakefield called the state’s Adult Protective Services hotline after a man told her his wife would be better off dead than in the nursing home and refused to let her stay any longer.
“He said ‘If she’s lucky, she’ll just die on the way home,’” Wakefield said Tuesday, testifying before the House Aging and Long-term Care Committee.
The hotline is administered by the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services. People are encouraged to use it to alert officials of actual or potential abuse or neglect of elderly or disabled persons
Wakefield runs the nursing home in Moran, a town of about 600 people in Allen County. She said the woman, who was in her early 90s, had been admitted to the facility after being discharged from a Kansas City hospital.
After a short stay, Wakefield said, the woman was taken home by her husband despite his wife’s poor condition and the fact that Wakefield was convinced he would be unable to properly to care for her.
“We had no legal recourse,” Wakefield said. “We couldn’t stop him. That’s why we called APS.”
But no one from SRS returned the nursing home’s calls, she said.
A few months later, the woman once again was hospitalized and sent to Moran Manor a second time upon discharge from the hospital.
“What happened was he was trying to wheel her outside to take her to the doctor’s office and she fell out of the wheelchair and down some stairs,” Wakefield said.
After the woman was admitted, she said, doctors discovered she had developed a very large bedsore that required treatment.
“Her husband told me ‘I got tired of changing her, so I let the brief (diaper) do its job until it couldn’t do it anymore,” Wakefield said.
Once again, she said, Adult Protective Services was called and once again SRS officials failed to intervene.
“Their response was, ‘She’s in a nursing home. She’s safe,’ even though her husband, who was sleeping in a van in our parking lot, kept coming in every day saying he was going to take her home.”
The woman died at the nursing home.
“APS did nothing to protect her,” Wakefield said.
State welfare officials can work with the courts to have a person committed or held in a nursing home if it is deemed in the best interest of the individual and the individual is ruled incompetent. More often or more likely, in the case of older people, the agency would try to work directly with the individual or with family members to persuade them that they need more care or services than they can manage on their own at home.
