Healthcare Compliance Perspective:
Healthcare Providers can work in partnership with local agencies, such as fire department, law enforcement, and community emergency response teams, to orchestrate fire prevention, planning, training, and response drills in order to prevent a situation similar to that below with untrained staff and unorganized response that result in unfortunate, avoidable harm to residents.
A senior living facility in the Santa Rosa, California, area was recently destroyed by an out of control fire that burned acres of forest and swept into several communities. Recently, a lawsuit was filed on behalf of several of the nearly 70 elderly residents living in that facility-some of them with dementia-who narrowly escaped the approaching fire. The lawsuit makes allegations of elder abuse, emotional distress and negligence by the facility’s management, and calls into question concerns about understaffing, the lack of an evacuation plan and possible abandonment of some elderly residents.
The lawsuit claims that when the incident occurred, only three staff members were left in the facility to care for the nearly 70 disabled residents-almost a dozen of them with dementia who resided in a locked area of the facility. About two-thirds of the facility’s total residents had been previously removed to different locations.
It was reported that the facility had earlier made public declarations via an email that, “All of our communities have evacuation plans.” However, when some of the family members arrived at the facility around 2 a.m. as the fire approached, they asked the staff specifically how they could help with the facility’s evacuation plan. They were told there was no plan, but staff were waiting for the facility’s director. The family members of the residents are credited with getting the n
early 70 residents out of the facility to safety.
The facility’s administration emailed this statement in response to reports that they had abandoned some of the residents, “While we were in the process of shuttling residents to a designated location, authorities refused to allow staff to reenter the area because of the existing danger ….”
A captain in the Santa Rosa Police Department later made this statement to reporters, “We were not stopping anybody from helping save lives that night.”
Another issue raised by the families and the residents involved the facility’s dumping of the remains of the destroyed facility into a landfill without giving the residents or their families an opportunity to check the remains for personal belongings.
