Early on January 3, a care centre employee at the end of a 12-hour shift found the woman unresponsive and conferred with a nurse, who declared the woman dead. The nurse informed the woman’s daughter and secured orders from a doctor to release her to a funeral home.
‘All employees undergo regular training’
Funeral home workers unzipped the body bag and noticed that the woman’s chest was moving and watched as “she gasped for air”, the report said. They called emergency services and the hospice.
An ambulance transported the woman to an emergency room with a low temperature and shallow breathing. The woman had a do-not-resuscitate directive, so she was brought back to the hospice at the Alzheimer’s care centre, where she died two days later.
Iowa’s Health Department fined the centre A$10,000 for two violations, which included a rule that says care homes must preserve the dignity of residents. The report did not address what, if any, actions were taken regarding the nurse.
On Sunday, an employee at Glen Oaks Alzheimer’s Special Care Center said she was not able to comment. The centre’s executive director, Lisa Eastman, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
Eastman sent a statement to the local television station KCCI, which reported on the case.
“We care deeply for our residents and remain fully committed to supporting their end-of-life care,” Eastman said in the statement. “All employees undergo regular training so they can best support end-of-life care and the death of our residents.”
The centre did not dispute the Health Department’s findings, according to the report. It has 30 days from February 1, the date of the citation, to request a formal hearing or pay the penalty.
The centre is a 66-bed residential facility run by Dallas-based Frontier Management, one of the largest senior housing managers in the United States.
The centre or its administrator has been fined more than a dozen times since opening in 2001, according to Iowa Health Department records, for violations that include a lack of specialised staff training in memory care and a lack of infection control during the pandemic, when patients who tested positive for Covid-19 were roomed with other residents.
It is not unheard of for people to be declared dead only to be found alive hours later.
On Saturday, an 82-year-old woman was pronounced dead at a nursing home in Port Jefferson, New York, but was found to be breathing about three hours later at the funeral home where she was taken, according to the Suffolk County Police Department, which is investigating. The unidentified woman was taken to a hospital.
The case has been referred to the New York attorney general’s office, police said. Calls to the nursing home, the Water’s Edge Rehab and Nursing Center, and O.B. Davis Funeral Homes in Miller Place, New York, were not immediately returned on Sunday.
In 2020, a woman in Michigan with cerebral palsy was declared dead by paramedics but was discovered to be breathing hours later by a funeral home worker who was preparing to embalm her body.
In 2018, a South African woman was pronounced dead at the scene of a car wreck but hours later was found alive in a mortuary.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Emily Schmall
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
