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Court records and interviews tell a different story. "The whole place was a fiasco," says nurse Patricia Lloyd, who moved away from California after she testified against Creekside, where she had worked for four years, until 1995. "Everybody was sick; everybody was having problems." Did such care lead to premature deaths among Creekside residents? "Absolutely," Lloyd says firmly and quickly. "I'm 100% sure. People would come in, they'd get depressed, stop eating and start falling. Then they'd get tied down to a chair, and they'd rapidly decline and die. That was something that was pretty common at Creekside."
Feeding was always a problem, says Suzanne Cologgi, a former Creekside nurse's aide. "The staff would give up really quickly, so the patient wouldn't get enough food," Cologgi says. "Because there wasn't enough staff, a lot of people went without eating or sat in dirty diapers." Many times Cologgi would have 20 minutes to feed seven residents, all of whom depended on her to spoon every bit of food into their mouth. "Sometimes you'd need 30 minutes for one," she recalls. "Full trays would go back untouched."
Patients who ate poorly were supposed to get 240-calorie liquid supplements to help them gain weight. "We didn't even pass them out, even though we signed [forms indicating] that they got them," Lloyd says. "Sometimes, patients who could talk would ask for them, and get them, but the patients who couldn't talk didn't--and they were the ones who really needed them." Medical charts, Lloyd says, were routinely falsified.
State inspectors told similar tales in their regular reports on Creekside. In early 1993 restraints were being used on 62 of 112 Creekside residents, some without consent. The family of a severely impaired woman at Creekside in 1992 had chosen a relative to make decisions regarding her care. Yet a state inspector found that the patient herself had signed consent forms allowing tranquilizers and physical restraints to be used on her. Such drugs were administered for "purposes of discipline or convenience" of Creekside's staff, a state report said.
There were pitiful examples of Creekside residents not getting enough to eat. A female resident sat in the dining room picking occasionally at her food for 25 minutes but didn't eat. Another resident complained that his food card--which specified that he disliked broccoli--was routinely ignored. "We don't look at the cards," a kitchen worker told him. A state inspection came upon a Dickensian scene: Creekside's cook violating federal regulations by adding water to pureed meat. "We usually use water," she said, "to thin the pureed meat." During another inspection, of nine residents supposedly playing a game, seven were doing nothing, one was participating, and "one resident was eating Play-Doh." In February 1993 inspectors found up to 35 residents parked in wheelchairs in common areas of the nursing home "for long periods of time (i.e., four hours or more) with no apparent meaningful activities."
When the laundry room's hot-water heater broke for a week, the staff washed bedding in cold water, which failed to do the job. Bedding and gowns "have yellow or brown stains and/or urine or fecal odors," the state reported. Towels were so rare that nurse's aides would wet and soap one end to wash residents and use the other half to dry them. Sheets were used for diapers.