Life Care fired staffer who revealed nursing home nightmare to Reuters

By Chris Kirkham

(Reuters) – A nursing home owned by Life Care Centers of America Inc has fired one nurse and banned another from the premises after the two were quoted in a Reuters investigation detailing horrific conditions, a staff exodus and a botched management response to the facility’s deadly COVID-19 outbreak.

Life Care terminated one of the nurses, Colleen Lelievre, last week after managers at the Littleton, Massachusetts, home accused her of making clerical errors involving narcotics for residents. She said she had not been told of any issues until June 12, two days after publication of the Reuters report. Another nurse, Lisa Harmon, said a manager barred her from the building the same day, without explaining why.

“I don’t know how they think that they’re just blatantly doing this and getting away with it,” said Harmon, a supervisor.

The Reuters report included interviews with Lelievre and Harmon describing an overwhelmed and overworked staff. In one instance, so many workers had quit or called in sick that managers assigned a teenage nursing-assistant trainee to a shift caring for nearly 30 dementia patients, Harmon and a former worker said. Eighty- to ninety-hour weeks became the norm, the two nurses said. In a dementia unit, workers were unable to keep residents from wandering into hallways and other patients’ rooms, potentially spreading infection.

The two nurses also said management left staff in the dark about the outbreak and didn’t provide staff testing until mid-May. Thirty-four workers had tested positive by that month’s end, federal data shows. Twenty-five residents and one nurse died of COVID-19. (To read the Special Report, click here )

Amy Lamontagne, the facility’s executive director, denied that she fired Lelievre for talking to Reuters. Lamontagne said Harmon has not been terminated but that administrators wanted to meet with her to discuss concerns she raised in the article. Harmon said she hasn’t been paid since being barred from the facility.

An undated handout photo of nurse Lisa Harmon who was barred from entering her workplace at the Life Care Center of Nashoba Valley in Massachusetts, days after being quoted in a Reuters article detailing a staff exodus and a botched management response to the facility’s deadly coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak. Lisa Harmon/Handout via REUTERS

Lamontagne said she terminated Lelievre for errors in “the administration and documentation of narcotics.” Lamontagne declined to detail that lapse and would not address why she hadn’t raised the problem with Lelievre until after the Reuters article ran. She said the facility started investigating Lelievre two days before the article ran.

“The timing of it is poor,” Lamontagne said.

A spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Attorney General, told by Reuters of Life Care’s actions against the nurses, said “we take allegations of workplace retaliation very seriously.”

Spokeswoman Chloe Gotsis added that the attorney general is already scrutinizing the facility’s management of the crisis: “We have an active and ongoing investigation into the Life Care Center of Nashoba Valley’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak.”

U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan, who represents the Littleton area, said the nursing home put its own interests above patient and staff safety.

“If the corporate leadership of Life Care Centers of America showed as much concern for residents and workers at their facility in Littleton as they do for their public image and self-preservation, lives could have been saved,” Trahan said. “Shameful behavior like whistleblower retaliation is often used to cover up wrongdoing.”

Life Care is among the largest U.S. nursing home operators, with more than 200 homes. Company President Beecher Hunter did not respond to requests for comment. Company spokesman Tim Killian declined to comment on the alleged retaliation and did not answer questions about whether corporate higher-ups directed or knew about the actions against the nurses.

Life Care also presided over one of the first and deadliest U.S. outbreaks of the coronavirus at its nursing home in Kirkland, Washington – with 45 deaths linked to the facility, according to local public health authorities. (For a story on the Kirkland outbreak, click here)

In its investigation, Reuters interviewed several other workers and former workers at the home, who also detailed mismanagement, staff shortages and lapses in care. But Lelievre and Harmon were two of three current employees who agreed to have their names published, and both nurses were quoted more extensively than the third worker.

The facility never restricted Lelievre’s access to drugs before she stopped working, Lelievre said. At the time of the alleged paperwork errors, Lelievre said, she had been working 16-hour days during the outbreak and in one case worked 24 hours because no one else could fill shifts.

Harmon, the nurse supervisor, said if paperwork mistakes during the outbreak are grounds for termination, then “every nurse in that building should be fired.”

Harmon herself contracted COVID-19 during the outbreak and used 10 days of accrued sick time because the company offered no additional paid days to workers who contracted the disease.

Lamontagne said Harmon never addressed staffing issues with management before speaking to Reuters, “even though that’s her supervisory role to bring it up through a chain of command.”

Harmon said she raised concerns about staffing shortages many times with Lamontagne and other administrators, often telling them the home had no nursing assistants on certain shifts.

“The whole time, I have been begging for help,” Harmon said. “How much more do you need to know that the staffing is horrible?”

(Reporting by Chris Kirkham; Editing by Brian Thevenot)

A pandemic nurse’s love letter to New York

By Shannon Stapleton and Clare Baldwin

NEOSHO, Mo. (Reuters) – The coronavirus pandemic has restricted almost everyone’s freedoms in America but for Meghan Lindsey it has done the opposite. This is the freest she has ever felt.

Traveling to New York City at age 33 to work as a COVID-19 nurse was the first time that Meghan, a married mother of two, had ever left southwest Missouri.

“It was my first time on a plane,” she said, describing how she came to work 12-hour shifts in the intensive care unit at NYU Winthrop Hospital.

“Flying into New York was the first time I’d ever seen the ocean.”

There are many stories about the lonely coronavirus deaths in the city’s hospitals and the traumatic work of the nurses who staff them.

Meghan’s story is about unexpected opportunities. It’s a story of how the pandemic gave a woman the chance to strike out into the world, confront danger and make a difference, and how her husband stayed home to care for their daughters. It’s a story about new beginnings.

“I always wanted to do something for my country,” said Meghan. “This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something meaningful.”

Meghan’s first nursing shifts in New York were a shock.

There are a lot of sick people in Missouri with chronic diseases like diabetes, where the progressions are slow and the declines are familiar.

COVID-19 patients are stunned by a virus that turns their lives upside down and in many cases ends them.

“One of my patients had her toes done up all nice and pretty and still had her jewelry on,” said Meghan.

Because they were coronavirus patients and visitors were banned, it was Meghan who would hold their hands as they died.

“Once you FaceTime and you meet their family and you hear them crying and sobbing, you know their cute little nicknames and you start to know them, it just gets to be really personal,” said Meghan. “You have a hard time separating yourself and not truly grieving for them as well.”

Despite all of the death, Meghan’s time in New York City’s COVID-19 wards was unexpectedly affirming. The pandemic gave Meghan something that her life in Missouri so far had not: a feeling of everything sliding into place.

When Meghan graduated from nursing school, it wasn’t like she imagined. It turned out to be just a job. She mourned.

“Now for once, it’s actually something important,” said Meghan. “This is the first time since I’ve become a nurse that it’s like, ‘yes, this is why.’ I can make a difference, and I can help, and I am strong enough for this.”

Her kids, she said, are proud. “They know that what I’m doing is hard and that I put my life in danger.”

Meghan is from a small town in Missouri. Most Sundays, she goes to church. Her mom was a manager at Walmart and her dad worked construction. Before he lost his job to the pandemic, her husband Aaron sold fire suppression systems to small businesses.

Meghan is the first in her family to finish college and has long held her family together. As thrilling as it was to be in New York, it was also hard.

Meghan often wondered if she should come home. Her husband Aaron told her no. He and the girls were fine, what she was doing mattered and he was proud of her. He sometimes called her superwoman.

“If he wasn’t such a good dad and there for my children, I could never do this,” said Meghan. He deserves credit too, she said, “but I guess you could say the limelight’s on me.”

Being a COVID-19 travel nurse isn’t glamorous. Meghan had to wear protective gear during her shifts and there was a lengthy decontamination process when she got home each night. She lived in a hotel room with another nurse and had to find a laundromat every few days to wash her scrubs.

But sometimes it did feel like a grand adventure. She saw the Statue of Liberty. She heard someone speaking Russian. She learned how to fold a slice of pizza.

Restaurants sometimes gave her and her friends free food “because we’re nurses,” she said with a bit of awe. She took selfie after selfie standing in the middle of empty New York City streets and no cabbies honked at her.

Her husband Aaron said he was sometimes a little jealous (it’s New York), occasionally worried (again, New York), but mostly he was just really proud. “Meghan hasn’t been out there in the world,” he said. She nailed it.

Now, at the end of her contract, Meghan is unsure of what the future holds.

She is back in a small town in the Midwest. She no longer has a job and she is coming off the biggest high of her life. She sometimes asks herself, will I have the desire to go back to this life?

Something about New York stood out to her: people there had aspirations to make something of themselves.

(Reporting by Shannon Stapleton and Clare Baldwin; Editing by Kieran Murray and Lisa Shumaker)

Nurses To Strike Over Ebola Measures

A series of rallies and strikes took place across the United States Wednesday as nurses spoke out about what they feel are insufficient measures taken for their protection when dealing with Ebola.

National Nurses United, a California-based union, said that hospitals do not have enough hazardous materials outfits that leave no skin exposed to bodily fluids along with air purifying respirators to avoid accidental inhalation of particles.

“Inadequate preparedness for Ebola symbolizes the erosion of patient care standards generally,” National Nurses United spokesman Charles Idelson told Reuters on Tuesday.

Strikes began early in California on Tuesday with over 20,000 nurses taking part in the protests.

Over 100,000 joined the protests on Wednesday including a group that held a vigil outside the White House.

Two nurses who attended to Thomas Eric Duncan in Dallas became infected with the virus and hospital workers told media outlets there were times the nurses did not have adequate protection.

Ebola Exposed Nurse Flaunts Quarantine

A nurse who worked on Ebola patients in Sierra Leone who returned to the U.S. and complained about mandatory quarantine is now flaunting a voluntary quarantine.

Kaci Hickox, 33, had been working in Sierra Leone as part of Doctors Without Borders.  New Jersey officials ordered her into quarantine when she returned to the United States and she hired lawyers to challenge the ruling.  She eventually was allowed to leave for her home state of Maine if she agreed to a voluntary quarantine.

Hickok said she would flaunt any quarantine order because she believes there’s no risk of exposing anyone to Ebola because she’s not sick.

She left her home to take a bike ride with her boyfriend this morning in full view of national media cameras.  Her lawyer said that because Hickox didn’t want to “freak people out” she didn’t ride through the center of town.

“Since there’s no court order, she can be out in public,” Siegel said. “Even if people disagree with her position, I would hope they respect the fact that she’s taking into account the fear, which is based on misinformation about the way the disease is transmitted.”

Hickox and her lawyer claim the orders for quarantine are just politically motivated.