Safeguards ignored in string of assisted living tragedies Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/05/01/113429/safeguards-ignored-in-string-of.html#ixzz1L8kJ0x20

Well, since most of us are simply considered machines whose purpose is to help a few people live extremely well, what else would be expected?

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/05/01/113429/safeguards-ignored-in-string-of.html

Posted on Sunday, May 1, 2011

y Rob Barry, Michael Sallah and Carol Marbin Miller | McClatchy Newspapers

MIAMI — For more than a decade, Bruce Hall ran his assisted-living facility in Florida's Panhandle like a prison camp.

He punished his disabled residents by refusing to give them food and drugs. He threatened them with a stick. He doped them with powerful tranquilizers and, when they broke his rules, he beat them — sending at least one to the hospital.

"The conditions in the facility are not fit even for a dog," one caller told state agents.

When Florida regulators confronted Hall in 2004 over a litany of abuses at his facility, they said, he chased them from the premises while railing against government intrusion.

Under state law, regulators could have shut down Sunshine Acres Loving Care or suspended the home's license, but they did neither. Instead, they ordered the 50-year-old Hall to see a therapist for his anger and to promise not to use "any weapon or object" on his residents — allowing him to keep the doors of his Washington County facility open for five more years.

In that time, Hall went on to break nearly every provision of Florida's assisted-living law: He threw a woman to the ground, and forced her to sleep on a box spring for six days after she urinated on her covers. Though the temperature outside reached 100 degrees, he forced his residents to live without air conditioning. And during a critical overnight shift, he fell asleep on the job while a 71-year-old woman with mental illness wandered from her bed, walked out the door and drowned in a nearby pond.

In a state where tens of thousands reside in assisted living facilities, the case of Sunshine Acres represents everything that has gone wrong with homes once considered the pride of Florida.

Assisted living facilities were established more than a quarter-century ago in landmark legislation to provide shelter and sweeping protections to some of the state's most vulnerable citizens: the elderly and mentally ill.

But a McClatchy investigation found the safeguards once hailed as the most progressive in the nation have been ignored in a string of tragedies never before revealed to the public.


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