Nursing Home to Pay for Alleged Abuse

Las Vegas, NVEdward "Tiger" Monsour was placed in a nursing home by his sons to recover from a fall. The 75-year-old emerged less than a year later in far worse shape than when he arrived, and he died from alleged nursing home abuse a few weeks after being discharged from a facility that was supposed to improve his well-being, not take it away.

That alleged lack of care translated to a $754,000 award for Monsour's family.

Here's the story: When Monsour's loving sons left their precious father in the care of Manor Health Care Center in Las Vegas to rehabilitate after a fall, they expected him to emerge closer to the hale and hearty father they knew.

Instead, it has been reported that the family patriarch was wheeled out of the facility in April 2006 wearing a diaper and suffering from bedsores. The man also exhibited a large ulcer on his heel that had blackened from gangrene, and he died a few weeks later of sepsis, a bacterial blood infection.

Monsour's four sons cried foul and filed a complaint in District Court, claiming that the nursing home facility failed to provide adequate supervision, lacked sufficient staff, and employed an insufficiently-trained wound care nurse who knew nothing about treating ulcers.

Arbitrator Stephen Huffaker agreed, and found that manor Health Care failed to perform "up to the standard of care mandated by Skilled Nursing Home rules and regulations."
The arbitrator found that the facility had violated Nevada law when it "failed to provide adequate care, causing pain and suffering to both the deceased, and his family."

Sadly, for Monsour's family, it isn't over yet. Lawyers for the nursing home facility have filed a motion to seek a reduction of the award amount based on a portion of the arbitrator's ruling that stated, "the evidence showed that Mr. Monsour would have died from the underlying physical ailment, an ischemic pressure ulcer, regardless of quality of care."

That hearing is scheduled for September 8th. However, regardless of the complexities and nuances of this particular case, most experts agree that Huffaker's original ruling, and specifically the amount of the original award—three-quarters of a million dollars—sends a message to chronic care facilities that quality of care needs to improve.

In Nevada, the State Division for Aging Services investigated 4,476 cases of elder abuse over a one-year period spanning July 1 2006, to June 30th 2007. While those cases could happen anywhere—at home, or in a nursing home—it was reported that in the last six months the agency investigated 188 reports of elder abuse in group homes, or nursing homes.

According to data from the National Center on Elder abuse, up to two million Americans 65 years of age and older have been mistreated by someone from whom they required care and protection.

Tiger Monsour's sons reported changes in their father, an Army veteran, weeks after installing him into the facility. All seemed well at first—three meals a day, physical therapy, haircuts, laundry service, and access and egress to his room on his own.

What a difference a couple of months made.

It would not be long, according to his sons that Tiger's physical therapy stopped. His clothes were lost at the laundry, his money was stolen. No one was willing to take him to the restroom, so he was installed in diapers. His sons claim that his meals stopped too, and that they found their otherwise hale and hearty father, strong and not given to complaining, in his room crying.

"He felt helpless," his son Danny told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. "…His voice was never heard."

And soon he would be dead.

The family is hoping the award stands, as a message to chronic care facilities that nursing home abuse must stop.