Disability Groups Call for Probe Into Nursing Home Neglect in Utah Care Facilities

A national health advocacy group alleges that Utah’s health department is allowing long-term care facilities in that state to provide poor quality care to elderly and ill residents, indicating that they are routinely subjected to unchecked, egregious nursing home physical and sexual abuse.

The Disability Law Center (DLC) and the National Health Law Program lodged an administrative complaint against the Utah Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) in July, outlining what they say is a lack of oversight into long-term care facilities that has gone on for more than a decade.

The complaint was submitted to the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), and the Office for Civil Rights within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on July 10, asking that the federal government cancel contracts with Medicaid facilities that are not meeting minimum health and safety standards. The DLC indicates that these incidents of nursing home neglect have led to serious harm to Utah patients with disabilities over the past 10 years, despite repeated complaints to Utah’s DHHS.

Ongoing Egregious Abuse

The DLC highlighted instances of abuse, sexual assault, and death going back as far as 2014. Reports include details on sometimes inhumane conditions due to nursing home neglect, including raw sewage, bed bug infestations, failure to provide critical psychiatric care, and inadequate staffing.

At Benchmark Behavioral Health, a boy’s psychiatric facility in the state, there were 61 reports of physical assault and 36 reports of sexual assault since 2019. The staff failed to report the assaults to the parents. Additionally, local news declined to publish details of several cases, citing they were too graphic for publication.

In many cases, the DHHS failed to shut down unsafe facilities, sometimes placing them on conditional licensing, meaning the facilities continued to receive full funding from the CMS and no additional oversight was put into place.

“As the complaint shows, going back to 2014, the DLC has brought instances of abuse and neglect, including sexual assault and death, to the attention of DHHS,” Nate Crippes, Public Affairs Supervising Attorney with the DLC, said in a July 10 press release. “Unfortunately, the State has failed to take the action necessary to prevent these harms, so we are calling on federal regulators to step in and ensure Utahns with disabilities are kept safe.”

The complaint asks the OIG to review CMS payments and the Upper Payment Limit for facilities in Utah, which allows the facilities to receive higher pay rates for complying with health standards. It also calls for an investigation into the failure of the DHHS to provide oversight on facilities receiving federal funds that are not in compliance with safety and health standards. The complaint indicates that some of the facilities have since closed, but new facilities have opened, and intervention is needed to stop further harm to residents.

“The state’s dereliction of its duties to monitor and take action on abuse and neglect of people with disabilities is egregious, an abject failure of government, and a misuse of the federal funds meant to provide services to and protect people with disabilities,” said Elizabeth Edwards, Senior Attorney at the National Health Law Program. “The state’s pattern of only taking action after the DLC works to get public attention to issues known to DHHS is unconscionable.”