Elder Voice's Kris Sundberg and Dr. Eilon Caspi provide data and insight into the lack of accountability in negligent deaths.
By James Walsh | The Minnesota Star Tribune
A woman who had suffered a stroke, was blind in one eye and mostly blind in the other transferred from a nursing home to Golden Nest Assisted Living in northeast Minneapolis. Her second-floor room was 20 feet from the front stairs.
Two days later, on Sept. 15, 2024, she was found at the bottom of those stairs, unresponsive. She died at the hospital three hours later. State officials said in a recently released report that Golden Nest was at fault; the woman should not have been walking alone.
It is the third time Golden Nest has been cited in a resident’s death. In 2018, a woman with dementia wandered outside in the cold and died. And in 2017, a resident fell and was left bleeding on the floor for four hours.
Yet, for Minnesotans searching for information about facilities for a loved one, reports about those incidents are no longer on the state Department of Health’s website. In an email, agency spokesman Garry Bowman said reports are removed after “7 years for substantiated findings, 4 years for inconclusive findings, and 3 years for not substantiated findings per state statute.”
While state law allows the records to come down, advocates say the difficulty of tracking incidents is another example of a blind spot in Minnesota’s lack of accountability. Last month, state officials acknowledged they don’t keep a tally of assisted living and nursing home deaths due to negligence.
“It’s just such an atrocity and they keep happening,” said Kristine Sundberg, executive director of Elder Voice Advocates, a Minnesota coalition of elders, adults with disabilities and their families. “And for-profit, small providers are trying to reduce the oversight that assisted living licensure requires. How do you do that and still keep people safe?”
Golden Nest administrator Hongjoo Lee has not responded to multiple phone messages seeking comment.
In response to the 2018 death, Lee told the Minnesota Star Tribune then that she didn’t agree with the state’s finding of neglect. But she said she missed the deadline for appealing the findings.
Comments