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http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/26/nyregion/26NURS.html

McCall Faults Nursing Home Investigations

By LYDIA POLGREEN

housands of complaints about poor care at nursing homes in New York were ignored or not properly investigated by the State Health Department last year, according to an audit released yesterday by State Comptroller H. Carl McCall.

Mr. McCall said the failures occurred even after the state centralized its system of tracking complaints. In the new system, instituted in May 2001, complaints are entered into a centralized database managed by department officials in Albany and sent to regional offices for investigation. The system includes a toll-free number so people can check the status of their complaints.

But the audit, which compared the database records with records kept in regional offices, found serious discrepancies between the records, indicating that many complaints were not properly investigated, Mr. McCall said.

The audit found that of a random sample of complaints, 43 percent were not investigated promptly or not investigated at all. Nearly 1,000 cases, including 695 in the New York City region, were assigned to investigators who no longer worked for the Health Department, the audit found, and more than 1,200 complaints were assigned to investigators who lacked proper certification.

In some cases, serious complaints of physical abuse or safety concerns were not investigated within two days, even though investigators are required by law to do so within that period, the audit found.

At a news conference in Manhattan yesterday, Mr. McCall, who is running for governor, accused Gov. George E. Pataki's administration of failing to "adequately investigate allegations of abuse, neglect and mistreatment" of nursing home residents across the state.

A statement released yesterday by the Health Department said that it has more investigators than ever before, 246 to supervise 685 nursing homes, and that it levied record fines in 2001. According to the statement, 95 homes were inspected in 2001, up from 43 the previous year.

John Signor, a spokesman for the Health Department, said Mr. McCall had twisted the audit results to suit his political purposes. "Once again, Carl McCall is unnecessarily scaring seniors and their families in a shameless attempt to further his political ambitions," he said. "Every complaint received by the department is reviewed and investigated."

Health care watchdog groups said the audit confirmed accounts of problems that they had heard about for years. Cynthia Rudder, director of the Nursing Home Community Coalition, said investigations into complaints often ended without family members being informed of the outcome of the inquiries, or were investigated improperly or too slowly.

"One resident complained about a lack of blankets in the winter, but by the time the investigator showed up it was summer and he found there was no problem with blankets," Ms. Rudder said.

Patricia Sheehan put her father, Oswaldo Esteves, 73, in a nursing home in Jackson Heights, Queens, almost two years ago, when his symptoms of Alzheimer's disease became too much for her mother to handle at home. When her father contracted pneumonia in spring of 2001 and had to be hospitalized, doctors discovered that his body was covered with tiny red insect bites.

Mrs. Sheehan said she got no response when she called the Health Department to complain. She put her father in a different home but tried to follow up to make sure other patients in the first home did not suffer the same problems.

Six months later, an investigator called her to check on her father's status. "They said there was no need to pursue it anymore since he had been moved," Mrs. Sheehan said. "I was totally shocked."

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