What happens to the elderly residents of a residential care facility when the facility decides to close? Do existing laws provide adequate legal protection to elders in those situations? Look at what's happening in Oakland, California to 105-year-old Josephine Dukes, as reported by the Oakland Tribune.

Mrs. Dukes surely thought that the Matilda Brown Home would be her home for the rest of her life when she arrived there four years ago. After all, the Matilda Brown Home, in the Temescal district of Oakland, has been operating as an assisted-living facility for low-income women since 1928.

Mrs. Dukes is remarkedly healthy, mentally intact, and still walks with the use of a cane. But, life has thrown her some curve balls the last few years.

Josephine Dukes was born in 1902 in Mississippi, where she says the doctor told her mother that she was “too small and weak to survive.” That's a good one! She graduated from college and was a teacher for many years. She and her husband moved to California during World War II, where she and her husband had an income tax business and owned rental properties. “She was very active in the West Oakland community helping other people” according to her legal guardian, Tommie Lindsie.

In the 1990s, her home and rental properties were sold after her husband passed away. She should have been sitting pretty, but she was the victim of financial elder abuse. She lost most of her life savings when she loaned a “friend” money to pay off a lien in the 1990s. But, as she says, “I was a victim of a rip-off scheme.”

So, at 97 years of age, she went back to work, working 20 hours a week at the Housing Authority telephoning other seniors to check on their well being. She retired from that job at age 100. She now relies only on her late husband’s Army pension of $700 a month.

Mrs. Dukes and 16 other residents of the Matilda Brown Home were notified on March 10, 2007 that the home will be closing its doors June 15, 2007. The nonprofit Ladies Home Society, which runs the home, says that dwindling finances and escalating expenses are forcing the closure. They are expecting Mrs. Dukes’ legal guardian, Tommy Lindsey, to find her a place to live, but with her limited finances, it is not easy, and certainly not with just 90 days notice.

Says Tommy Lindsey, “This [closure notice] all came about so fast. Here we thought she was settled for life. They’ve given us an organization we can contact, and I’m trying to get the paperwork together. But, gosh, Mrs. Dukes being 105 and having to be moved back and forth like a vagabond - this shouldn’t happen.”

Yes, why the big rush when evidently the home has had financial problems going back to 2002? The head of the Ladies Home Society told the Tribune reporter, “There’s obviously the question of whether three months notice was enough . . . If it had been five or six months, we would have lost our best employees, and would have been operating at a greater and greater loss as residents moved out. We thought three months would give everybody ample time to find another place.”

Does this sound like they decided that if someone’s ox needed to be gored, it would be the elderly residents', such as Josephine Dukes, and NOT the nonprofit corporation's? I hate to criticize a nonprofit with such a great history of community service (they even provided a subsidy of $2,000 a month to Mrs. Dukes so that she could live there on her monthly pension), but that's what it sounds like to me. Given that the residents are low income, the nonprofit knows that it will not be easy for them to relocate.

Imagine what happens to residents of assisted living facilities run by FOR-PROFIT CORPORATIONS that are closing. Very often the residents get a few weeks notice.

Mrs. Dukes’ situation may be the kick in the pants the California legislature needs in order to pass laws guaranteeing elders legal protections when assisted living facilities close. Assembly Bill 949 (Paul Krekorian) is coming before the California Assembly Human Services Committee on April 24, 2007. The proposed legislation would require residential care facilities for the elderly to prepare an evaluation of the relocation needs of each resident PRIOR to giving the residents 90 days notice of closure of the facility. The evaluation would have to include "a listing of other facilities that are available and adequate to meet the resident’s needs" per the text of the bill. The closing facility would have to pay a relocation fee of $2,500 to each resident, to help defray moving costs. The closing facility will be subject to daily fines if they don’t follow the relocation requirements.

To read the text of AB 949, click here.

If anything, the question is whether the proposed law goes far enough, and whether 90 days notice is enough. 90 days notice isn’t enough unless the closing facility has for each resident that will be displaced the names of comparable facilities that are ready, willing, and able to take on each resident, and which the resident can afford. A list of places that “in principle” are available is meaningless.

Send your thoughts about AB 949 to Jim Beall, Chair Assembly Human Services Committee, State Capitol, Room 4206, Sacramento CA 95814, fax (916) 319-2189, and copy California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform (CANHR), the advocacy group that spearheaded the legislation, at fax (415) 777-2904.

In response to the Tribune’s April 14 article, community members immediately offered Mrs. Dukes spare rooms in their homes, and a neighborhood group Friends of Matilda Brown has been formed to try to stop the home from closing altogether.

Thanks to Angela Hill of the Oakland Tribune, for her excellent coverage, which has brought Mrs. Dukes' situation to light. To read her articles, click here and click here.


Felicia Curran
www.ElderAdvocacyLaw.com

A colleague in our firm recently asked me if I could tell her how she could check the track record of a residential care facility that her father has moved to. The short answer is, “Realistically, you can't.”

California Residential care facilities for the elderly (RCFEs) are licensed by the California Department of Social Services Community Care Licensing Division, Senior Care Program Offices (“DSS” for short). As part of its oversight responsibilities, DSS investigates complaints made on behalf of residents, conducts surprise inspections, generates reports, and issues citations and fines to facilities who are caught violating the licensing regulations. DSS investigates so infrequently, and sometimes so ineffectively, that many bad facilities dodge the bullet and have a clean licensing file. So if DSS has actually cited or fined a facility, or found the facility to be in violation of regulations relating to resident’s rights or resident’s care, that is something you should know about before your loved one goes to live there. Department of Social Services does not post any of this vital information on the web. The only information they post is name, license number, and number of beds. To see their website,

click here

This is a typical entry from the DSS website, for a RCFE in Albany:

Facility No: 015600285 Capacity: 0013
License Status: Licensed
RN3 LOVING CARE HOME
906 CORNELL AVENUE
ALBANY , CA 94706
(510) 526-2533
Contact: CHENG, FANGJUAN
DO: CENTRAL COAST SC/RES (14)
DO Phone: (650) 266-8800

I have no personal information about the RN3 Loving Care Home, and the point is that neither will you, just by looking at the DSS website. But you should. The only way to access the DSS information now is to go to one of the 5 DSS Senior Care Program Offices around the State (Rohnert Park, San Bruno, Woodland Hills, San Diego, and Sacramento). That’s not reasonable access to this vital public information.

Posting of citations, fines, and evaluation reports for each facility would alert unsuspecting family members about that facility, and could actually force a change for the better in how these facilities care for their residents. The New York Times recently had an article about a new website put up by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov.

The website says that it “provides information on how well the hospitals in cities across the country care for all their adult patients with certain medical conditions, on a comparative basis.” The New York Times article described how in the year preceding the launching of this website, several prominent hospitals actually improved their performance in key aspects of their patient care for the reason that the hospitals knew that their ”score cards” would soon be on the web for all to see. The hospitals were candid in admitting that the prospective posting of the data on the website actually spurred them to improve performance.

RCFEs, like the hospitals listed on the www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov website, would very likely do a better job for their elderly residents if they knew their track record would be there on the web for all to see. There is no excuse for hiding this information from California residents and their families.

Contact Ben Partington, Program Administrator at the DSS Sacramento Office, 744 P Street, MS 10-90 Sacrament, CA 95814, fax (916) 653-9335 and Governor Schwarzenegger (click here) and let them know what you think.


Felicia Curran
www.ElderAdvocacyLaw.com