TOPEKA — The acting head of the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services apologized Thursday afternoon for the agency not doing enough to investigate reports of elder abuse and neglect.
“We regret this,” said Jeff Kahrs, interim SRS secretary, testifying before the House Aging and Long-term Care Committee.
SRS, he said, was committed to changing an agency “culture” that allowed workers to ignore many of the reports.
“We’ve got people who’ve been doing this a while, so there’s a culture there,” Kahrs said. “People are going to have to realize that change is going to have to take place.”
Earlier this week, the committee heard testimony from two nursing home administrators who said their calls to the SRS-administered elder-abuse hotline appeared to have been deemed irrevelant.
Deborah Zehr, executive director with LeadingAge Kansas, on Thursday said nursing home administrators often call the hotline to report relatives suspected of pilfering a resident’s estate. But SRS, she said, rarely intervened.
“We do not believe they are effective,” she said of the agency.
It wasn’t unusual for family members to spend a relative’s savings on themselves, force the relative onto the state’s Medicaid rolls and leave the nursing home “holding the bag for $40,000 to $60,000 in uncompensated care,” she said.
Historically, SRS has shown little or no interest in going after relatives who have raided the estates of nursing home residents in that way, she said.
“The attitude is ‘They’re in a nursing home, they’re safe and they’re on Medicaid. They’re OK, so let’s move on ’” she said.
Zehr told the committee that when a resident goes on Medicaid the cost of their care becomes a public burden.
“This is costing all of us as taxpayers,” said the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bob Bethell, an Alden Republican. “Essentially, we’re subsidizing all the pilfering that’s gone on.”
Kahrs said he thought SRS could resolve its hotline troubles “by the end of the year.”
But Rep. Trent LeDoux, a Holton Republican, said he wasn’t willing to wait that long.
“I’ve had a bellyful of this,” he said. “Our state government should be ashamed of itself.”
LeDoux later told KHI News Service that after Tuesday’s testimony he’d called the nursing homes in his district and had been told the SRS hotline system was ineffective.
