18 COVID-19 cases in Clark County nursing home with history of infection deficiencies
A low-rated Clark County nursing home with a history of infection control deficiencies — including inadequate hand washing — reported on Monday that at least 13 residents and five staff have been infected with the novel coronavirus.
Signature HealthCARE at Fountain Circle in Winchester previously had two staff members who tested positive for COVID-19, according to the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services. But the Louisville-based Signature HealthCARE, Kentucky’s biggest nursing home chain, is testing everyone in the facility, and the larger numbers show the initial results, company officials said.
“We’ve been working around the clock getting ready for COVID-19 — and we are ready now that the day is here,” said Chris Cox, the company’s chief operating officer, in a prepared statement.
“This is why we hired the experts we have on our team, including a new chief infectious disease physician,” Cox said. “Our intense preparations are effective, especially in this situation, with staff screening themselves and residents daily, and staff readily identifying anyone who might have the virus early and getting them sent out and tested right away.”
Asked if it’s possible that employees had unwittingly brought the virus into the nursing home, which has been closed to most visitors since March 10, company spokeswoman Ann Bowdan Wilder said “our facility considers a number of scenarios in containing this virus and is very aware that some virus carriers are asymptomatic.”
However, Wilder added, some residents have continued to leave the facility for necessary medical appointments, so employees are not the only people coming and going from the building or encountering others in the community.
“These medical, sometimes daily appointments often require going to the hospital for various reasons, and then our residents return back to us and our facility,” she said. “In these transports, our residents are around EMS personnel, transport and hospital staff.”
Statewide, COVID-19 has led to more than 1,400 resident and staff infections and 200 deaths at 96 nursing homes since March. Two other Signature HealthCARE facilities are among the hardest-hit: Summit Manor in Adair County, with 83 infections and 11 deaths, and Jackson Manor in Jackson County, with 63 infections and 16 deaths.
Fountain Circle is rated as “much below average” when compared to other nursing homes by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, with particularly low scores on its health ratings by state inspectors who periodically visit the facility. Its various deficiencies since 2018 have resulted in nearly $190,000 in fines.
Among the deficiencies cited in recent years were several related to infection prevention and control, according to state inspection reports. They include a failure by employees to wash their hands after treating residents, even after handling urine, feces and wounds, and failure to properly remove soiled linens while cleaning residents. One resident’s catheter urinary drainage bag was allowed to lie on the floor while it was still connected to him, elevating the risk of a urinary tract infection.
“Additional interviews revealed that failure to adhere to the facility’s infection control policies could likely result in resident and staff infection or illness,” inspectors wrote in a 2017 report noting a string of infection control errors.
The Herald-Leader has reported that many of the Kentucky nursing homes now struggling with COVID-19 outbreaks were cited by state inspectors in recent years with infection control deficiencies, often for problems as basic as lack of hand washing or equipment cleansing.
However, state regulators almost never issued a serious penalty for infection control violations, so they seldom resulted in fines or affected the federal government’s five-star rating system that the public uses to compare the quality of nursing homes, according to a Herald-Leader review of the 333 infection control citations issued to Kentucky nursing homes from April 2016 to December 2019.
This story was originally published May 18, 2020 at 4:22 PM.
