Tag Archives: Mike McGuire

Brius accused of understaffing nursing homes at public hearing

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California’s largest nursing home company could be facing a campaign to wrest control of its two Marin County homes after workers, residents and the families of residents testified that both homes are chronically understaffed and under-resourced.

“Given what we’ve heard, we feel they’re bad actors,” said Matt Myres, who chaired a Workers’ Rights Board hearing March 4 to look into the homes operated by Brius Healthcare.

The six-member board, convened by North Bay Jobs with Justice, issued several preliminary recommendations, including:

  • Increasing staffing
  • Raising caregiver wages to at least $15 an hour
  • Ensuring that caregivers have reliable schedules to reduce worker turnover

Final recommendations, expected to be released within a few weeks, will also consider how to go about bringing in a new operator for the nursing homes.

“We know that the community here needs the facilities for folks to receive good quality patient care,” Myres said. “But we also would like to see Brius’ license rescinded.”

WRB 2/4/18
Stanton Richardson talks about finding his father dangling from his bed at the understaffed Novato Healthcare Center.

Brius, which controls 1 in 14 nursing home beds across California, and 1 in 5 beds in Marin County, already finds itself squarely in the crosshairs of state officials.

The California State Auditor is reviewing the company’s dealings with dozens of other companies controlled by its owner, Shlomo Rechnitz. The California Department of Public Health has blocked Brius from taking over six nursing homes since 2014, citing its dismal patient care record. And former Attorney General Kamala Harris moved to block the company from taking over 19 additional homes, writing that Rechnitz was “a serial violator” of nursing home rules.

The situation is already dire in Marin County where Brius controls Novato Healthcare Center and San Rafael Healthcare and Wellness Center, whose employees are represented by the National Union of Healthcare Workers.

Both homes have been cited by state regulators for understaffing over the past year. During the hearing, residents and their loved ones said that both homes often rely on temporary caregivers who don’t have the same dedication as full-time staff.WRB 2/4/18

 

Ian Minto, the resident council president at the 181-bed Novato home, said he recently fell in the bathroom and needed more than an hour to pull himself up after no one responded to his cries for help.

When he later explained what had happened to a temporary nurse on duty, “She never looked up from her phone,” he said.

The actual employees do care about the patients,” Minto added. “They have a sense of humor. You can tell they are trying to do their best even though they are overworked and understaffed.”

He added, “I think things in Novato are only going to get better if management comes in touch with what employees need, which are better pay and benefits.”

Stanton Richardson testified that when he came to visit his father one afternoon, he found him tangled in his bed unable to help himself, while temporary staffers had neglected to check on him.

Richardson said the Novato facility, where annual staff turnover has topped 30 percent in recent years, was desperately in need of more caregivers earning enough money to keep them in their jobs.

“You may have two staff members caring for 15 to 20 people and they are overwhelmed,” he said. “I see it in their faces. They are very tired.”

Maria Martinez, a former nursing assistant at Brius’ home in San Rafael, said understaffing prevented her and other caregivers from giving patients the help they needed.

“A lot of times I had patients who were depressed and they were asking for their family, but I couldn’t sit down or hold their hands and talk to them because there was no time,” she said.

Martinez added that with 15 residents to care for, things inevitably fell through the cracks. “A lot of times we didn’t have time to brush their teeth … or wash their faces,” she said.

WRB 2/4/18

Bernice Dominguez, a housekeeper in Novato, testified that she sometimes was asked to check on patients even though she wasn’t credentialed to do that work. “It’s really very hard to listen to the cries of patients who need help,” said Dominguez, who makes $11.58 an hour after working at the facility for 15 years.

Rather than taking steps to keep long-term workers, Brius appears to be trying to oust them. The company recently changed workers’ schedules, preventing them from having the same days off every week. The constantly changing “floating” schedule makes it hard for people who have second jobs and families, said Benjamin Maldanado, a housekeeper in San Rafael.

“They not only broke their word to us,” Maldando said of Brius, “they are making us break our commitments to our families.”

The workers were supported by State Sen Mike McGuire, a Democrat from Healdsburg, who issued a statement saying that “Brius uses its patients as pawns” and that “quality is not part of its business model.”

Brius failed to present testimony at the hearing despite the panel’s invitation.

In speaking for the board, Myres said it was clear Brius needed to restore consistent schedules for its caregivers and boost their wages.

“Raising wages serves the interest of both care facilities since it would reduce employee turnover, prevent understaffing, save money by not having to retrain as many employees, and save on recruitment of new employees,” Myres said. “Most importantly it would improve patient care.”

 

Brius faces state audit

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Brius will be the subject of a California state audit looking into the company’s business dealings with other firms owned by Brius CEO Shlomo Rechnitz and his family members.

By a vote of 12-0, the state’s Joint Legislative Audit Committee approved the audit Wednesday at the request of State Sen. Mike McGuire and Assemblymember Jim Wood.

Both legislators represent Humboldt County, where Brius controls every nursing home. Last year, the lawmakers successfully fought Brius from closing three of its five homes in the county without giving into the firm’s demand for higher reimbursements for Medi-Cal patients.

“Through that process we learned a lot about Brius, its ownership structure and business operating procedures,” Wood said in a prepared statement. “(That) compelled us to better understand the impact and appropriateness of what are called related-party transactions.”

State Sen. Mike McGuire and Assemblymember Jim Wood

Brius, which controls one of every 14 nursing homes beds in California, received over $507 million in Medicare and Medi-Cal funds in 2015 – more than 80 percent of its total annual revenue. An analysis of state data by the National Union of Healthcare Workers found that during the same year, Brius paid over $67 million to 65 companies controlled by Rechnitz or his relatives.

Meanwhile, over the past year, the California Department of Public Health has blocked Brius from taking over five nursing homes citing its poor patient care track record and fined one Brius home in Humboldt County $160,000 for violations stemming from failing to properly staff the facility.

“We commend State Sen. McGuire and Assemblymember Wood for requesting this audit,” NUHW President Sal Rosselli said. “With thousands of the California’s frailest seniors living in Brius homes, the state has an obligation to determine whether the company is spending taxpayer money as it was intended – to care for its residents.”

The California state auditor will examine data Brius reported to the Department of Public Health, Department of Health Care Services and Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. The audit will also review current protocols for capturing transactions between companies with the same owner as well as the appropriateness of the transactions in order to ensure that services provided are fairly priced.

Several reports have already questioned whether Brius homes may be overpaying for rent and other services from Rechnitz-owned firms. For example, the North Coast Journal reported the following in 2016:

The disclosures include a section dubbed “related party transactions,” which describes financial interactions between parent companies and subsidiaries. Think of it as a kind of conflict of interest statement. In 2015, Eureka Rehabilitation and Wellness Center paid $42,000 to Boardwalk Financial Services, LLC for “administrative services.” The company employs Rechnitz as a consultant. It also paid $864,894 to lease the property. Who owns the property? Rechnitz. Eureka Rehabilitation and Wellness Center also paid $110,204 for medical supplies to TwinMed Medical Supplies and Services, owned by Shlomo Rechnitz and his twin brother, Steve. And it paid $47,663 to SR Capital, LLC, which lists Rechnitz as its managing member. Altogether, in the 2014-2015 fiscal year, as Rockport/Brius was playing a financial game of chicken with Partnership Healthcare and refusing to take in vulnerable seniors and people with disabilities, it managed to shunt more than $4.6 million back into companies affiliated with Shlomo Rechnitz.

While, on paper, the company may have lost money, Rechnitz still managed to profit. The amount he took in for lease payments alone in 2015 on the five properties — more than $3.5 million — was easily enough to cancel out Brius’ “unsustainable” combined loss of almost $1.5 million from the company’s Humboldt County holdings that year.

“As good stewards of state resources we must understand how Brius Healthcare and affiliated companies receive and invest Medi-Cal dollars,” McGuire said in a prepared statement.

Wood added, “This audit will investigate the inner workings and interrelated business relationships that exist in this industry and determine whether changes need to be made to protect the use of public funds for this vulnerable population.”

NUHW represents workers at two Brius homes in Marin County. Maria Martinez, who has worked as a nursing assistant for 27 years at the Brius-owned San Rafael Healthcare and Wellness Center, told Audit Committee members Wednesday in Sacramento that Brius “cut staffing levels, basic supplies and resources” when it took over the San Rafael home in 2012. “The quality of care for our residents has gone way down,” she said urging them to approve the audit. “We are understaffed almost every single day.”

Following this week’s approval of the audit request, the California State Auditor will now assign a team of auditors to carry out the investigation. The audit results will be published in 2018.

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Report: Brius failed to follow through on Humboldt pledge

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Brius Healthcare Services CEO Shlomo Rechnitz has failed to follow through on his pledge to work with local officials to improve health care for frail seniors, according to a report in the Eureka Times-Standard.

Late last year, Rechnitz told the paper that he would set up a charitable foundation to help pay for treatment of the elderly. He also pledged to work “with local stakeholders to determine how we can better care for our elderly and ensure that they have the necessary care and services locally.”

However, according to the Times-Standard, Rechnitz has failed to set up the foundation and neither Brius nor its administrative company, Rockport Healthcare Services, has followed up with local officials.

“We have not heard from any representative from Rockport in months,” North Coast State Sen. Mike McGuire told the newspaper. “As we have seen, Rockport has a track record of empty promises and it is deeply concerning that they haven’t followed through on any of the commitments that they made during this artificial crisis that they created.”

Rechnitz, who operates every nursing home in Humboldt County, threatened to close three of them last year. The closures, which Rechnitz claimed were needed because his homes were losing money, would have resulted in nearly 150 patients being transferred out of Humboldt County and far from their families, according to the Times-Standard.

Rechnitz later relented, closing only one of his five Humboldt County homes,  but Suzi Fregeau, Humboldt County’s long-term care ombudsman, told the paper that Rechnitz is still understaffing his facilities and failing to provide adequate care.

Rechnitz’s homes in Humboldt County have been fined over $160,000 this year for patient care violations stemming from understaffing. They have also been named in three wrongful death lawsuits. Two of the lawsuits allege that patients died from Stage 4  pressure ulcers that became infected, while the third accuses Brius of dumping a patient at a local hotel where he died four days later.