Harmful care a pattern at Chicago care facility

A Chicago Tribune investigation uncovered a pattern of harmful care at Alden Village North, a Chicago home for children and adults with developmental disabilities. Thirteen times in the last decade, residents have died under circumstances that led to state citations for neglect or failure to investigate. Instead of cracking down, regulators have allowed the problems to worsen. Two days after the second day of the series was published Gov. Pat Quinn ordered a health monitor be placed at the troubled Chicago facility and instructed his staff to draft legislation to address the problems.

An analysis by Journal Sentinel reporters Meg Kissinger, Steve Schultze and Ben Poston has found two medical directors in charge of care at the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex collected overtime totaling more than $300,000 at a time when federal inspectors twice declared patients there were unsafe. Overtime for Behavioral Health Division employees rose 42% in the past four years. High overtime payments were found throughout the department - from a janitor who collected more than $50,000 last year, to the nurse in charge of staff development, who topped $260,000 in overtime over the four years reviewed. Even high-ranking managers, including the medical directors, received overtime - putting the county payment system at odds with similar state-run institutions and other county departments.

Michael J. Berens, of The Seattle Times, uncovered hundreds of deaths inside state-licensed adult family homes indicating neglect or abuse, but the deaths were not reported to the state or investigated. Adult homes areless-regulated, less-expensive elder care options found in dozens of states. The Times reported that deaths indicating neglect occur at strikingly higher rates than in nursing homes. These stories are part of an on-going series, Seniors for Sale, that previously found some adult homes marketed the frail and vulnerable as commodities.

Alison Young of USA Today reports that food safety watchdogs are critical of the U.S Department of Agriculture staff on site at the two Iowa egg processors linked to the recent egg recall. They "question whether USDA egg graders should have noticed the vermin problems cited by the FDA, potentially preventing the recall of a half billion eggs and an outbreak that is linked to about 1,500 reported illnesses." While the Food and Drug Administration "significant objectionable conditions" in laying houses, the USDA claims their egg graders only observe conditions in the processing buildings.

From a violent patient allowed to roam free to a pregnancy case that violated policy at every turn and nurses who falsified documents to cover their mistakes, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation exposed a raft of problems at the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex, home to the county's most vulnerable residents. Reporters Meg Kissinger and Steve Schultze found lax oversight at the complex allowed a patient with a history of violence, including sexual assault, to repeatedly find new victims, including one who became pregnant and another he is charged with sexually assaulting. Staffers repeatedly allowed the patient to leave the secure ward, including overnight visits to a group home, at times signing charts to say he was being checked every 15 minutes.

An InvestigateWest report on the billion dollar cruise ship industry in the Washington-Alaska cruise market found that most ships avoid tougher state regulations and dump their waste in Canadian waters between the two states, despite state efforts to adopt stricter standards for sewage and wastewater discharge.

The Dallas Morning News published a two-day installment in its ongoing investigation into allegations of Medicare billing fraud and poor patient care at one of the nation's leading medical schools and its teaching hospital in Dallas. Among The News' findings: Faculty at UT Southwestern were letting resident doctors-in-training treat the hospital's mostly poor, minority patients with little or no supervision, leading to consequences like bungled surgeries and misdiagnoses. One administrator was quoted as saying in a faculty meeting it was "okay" for residents to make mistakes. But at two hospitals owned by the school for mostly privately insured patients, residents weren't allowed the same freedoms, prompting concerns about "two tier" care.

A story by Paula Lavigne, of ESPN, reveals some unappetizing realities about food service at the 107 stadiums used by the MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL across the country.  Through a review of inspection records from local health departments, Lavigne revealed that at "30 of the venues (28 percent), more than half of the concession stands or restaurants had been cited for at least one "critical" or "major" health violation. Such violations pose a risk for foodborne illnesses that can make someone sick, or, in extreme cases, become fatal."

Institutions for developmentally disabled New Yorkers have taken a new approach to care: locked units for people who officials say have had a brush with the law, according to an investigation by Mary Beth Pfeiffer of the Poughkeepsie Journal.  In Part 2 of the ongoing series, "Money Pit/Money Makers" the newspaper revealed that the state could provide no data on the criminal backgrounds of residents — for which they receive $4,556 per person per day in Medicaid reimbursements, making residents cash cows for state coffers.

An InvestigateWest investigation revealed that the same powerful chemotherapy drugs that have saved hundreds of thousands of patients’ lives for decades have at the same time taken a potentially deadly toll on the health of hospital and clinic workers who handled them. The federal government, despite knowledge of the potential risks, continues to let these deadly drugs slip through regulatory cracks, according to the InvestigateWest reporting. And recent studies show that health care workplaces continue to be contaminated, putting still more workers at risk.