Neglected in Care
IN JANUARY 2017, ROSALIE DOWNING WAS ADMITTED TO MOUNTAIN View Health & Rehabilitation, a low-slung nursing home with four wings in El Paso’s Golden Hill neighborhood. Rosalie had kidney disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes. She used a wheelchair and needed help using the bathroom, bathing, and getting into bed. Her son, Charles Downing, made the tough decision to put her in the nursing home, one recommended by her physician.
“Abuse has more headlines, but neglect has more victims.”
“She was getting dementia,” Charles said. “She wasn’t able to take care of herself. She was waking up two or three times a night.”
One November morning in 2018, Rosalie fell when a nurse tried to move her from the bed to her wheelchair. She fractured her right arm and hip and was in severe pain. Charles got a phone call from the nursing home and rushed to the facility, but Rosalie had already been sent to the hospital for surgery.
She died four days later at the age of 87. An inspector later determined that Rosalie’s nurse failed to follow “proper and safe” transfer procedures, resulting in blunt force injuries that contributed to her death.
Mountain View Health & Rehabilitation was acquired in February 2018 by Creative Solutions in Healthcare, a company that owns and operates 64 facilities in Texas and is the state’s second-largest nursing home owner.
At the time of Rosalie’s death, nine months after Creative Solutions took ownership of the facility, Mountain View was short-staffed. It received one out of five stars on the staffing rating provided by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), operating with 40 percent fewer registered nursing staff than its residents needed. Charles, who visited his mother every morning, said she sometimes waited 20 minutes for someone to answer her call light when she needed to use the bathroom.
“[Nurses] said, ‘Well, I’m with another patient.
