The Only Thing Worse Than Dying Is Living in a Nursing Home Owned by SunBridge Healthcare

My Mom's health continues precarious but she's currently enjoying (if that's the right word) a respite from the downward slope. She's still very weak—telephone conversations are limited to five minutes before she tires—but my sister reports that Mom's coloring is better and she is eating very, very, very tiny amounts of food.

But the conditions in the nursing home where she resides—Mashpee Care and Rehabilitation Center—go from worse to worse.

The latest round of preventable chaos stems from a mass quitting of ten nurses and aides, all of whom were longterm care providers, in the past two weeks. We know they all quit over a preventable pay dispute that became the proverbial straw on the camel's breakable back.

Now, on the weekends, the nursing home is woefully understaffed primarily by temp aides and RNs who don't know the patients, who have limited support from the facility's administration, and little or no supervision, training or guidance. Woefully understaffed is an understatement.

There aren't enough aides to deliver meals on time. Not enough aides to get these elderly, frail and vulnerable people to bed or to the toilet. Nurses have 19th century paperwork trails to figure out as they dispense medications. This past weekend, my Mom called my sister in a panic because she had not received her morning Parkinson's medication and it was 1 p.m. She had tremors so bad, she was frightened. She had tried four times to get a nurse in her room to administer the medication but no one came.

While my sister was there, a nurse did show up with some meds, most of which had been discontinued for weeks. And if my sister wasn't there, there would have been no Parkinson's medication at that time either.

This Mashpee facility is owned by SunBridge Healthcare which should really be renamed MoneyBridge Healthcare. We have complained—once again—to the corporate structure. But this time, we included a complaint to the director of the ombudsman program for Elder Care Services of Cape Cod. And we are contemplating more formal complaints.

MoneyBridge, we have found out, also owns an incompetent version of Hospice that it likes to subject its most frail and vulnerable patients to. We also now know that they own the temp agency that supplies the nurses and aides (most of whom do not speak English to patients who have hearing problems) that fill in some of the gaps on the weekends.

Tell me, how do these corporate types sleep at night?