Arbor Health Morton Hospital nurses read a patient’s chart.
The remaining four residents at Arbor Health Morton Hospital’s custodial care unit, which serves as a long-term nursing home, are being asked to find new homes after the Board of Commissioners for Lewis County Hospital District 1 decided to discontinue the program, citing concern for their clients’ and staff’s safety during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The decision faced criticism from community members and at least one family of a custodial care resident suspects the program was axed simply to avoid liability.
Jeffrey Wasson, a Randle resident whose 92-year-old mother is a resident of the custodial care unit, said his mom is one of the four remaining residents at Morton Hospital’s custodial care program after several had left in March.
The custodial care program is essential for him because his mother, who suffers from dementia, needs the memory care services the hospital is capable of providing. Now, Wasson cannot find a place with availability and the memory care services his mother needs that is close enough to him.
As of last Thursday, Wasson said he has not been notified of a specific date that his mother has to leave.
Wasson said he was suspicious about Arbor Health’s intentions of closing down the program because several months ago he was asked to sign a liability waiver for his mother to stay in the program.
At the hospital commission’s July 29 meeting, it was noted that the waivers would not protect the hospital from all the risk involved.
The Board of Commissioners’ Chair Trish Frady said while liability was factored into the equation, the hospital’s mission is to provide “safe, compassionate and quality healthcare to our community,” and the uncertainty of COVID-19 was putting that statement in jeopardy for the custodial care program.
“Our hospital was never really physically designed to separate our custodial residents from our other areas of care,” Frady said.
Because Morton Hospital is a smaller facility, Frady said there is not a staff that is dedicated to the custodial care unit, which is connected to the hospital. Nurses who tend to the elderly in the custodial care unit are also helping all of the other patients who are coming into the hospital.
Their fear is that a staff member could inadvertently introduce the virus to the custodial care unit while they are working on a task in another wing of the hospital.
Frady added that the residents of the custodial care program would be safer in a facility like a traditional nursing home, given the circumstances with COVID-19.
However, Wasson wholeheartedly disagreed with the notion that his mom would be safer in another nursing home and pointed to recent outbreaks in Lewis County nursing homes as evidence.
On Sept 28, Lewis County announced it had three outbreaks in long-term care facilities and one in a congregate treatment center, most notably among them Prestige Post-Acute and Rehab Center, which had 56 positive COVID-19 tests between residents and staff at that time.
“The point I made to the commissioners yesterday is this idea that they are going to be less vulnerable in a nursing home is just a wash,” Wasson said.
The decision to shut down the custodial care program came on Aug. 26 at the board’s regular meeting where they voted 3-2 in favor of discontinuing the program, with Commissioners Wes McMahan and Chris Schumaker voting nay and Frady, Tom Herrin and Craig Coppack voting yay.
The board had been mulling over the possibility of ending the program since July, Frady said, and hosted a special virtual meeting on Aug. 10 to get public input. According to the meeting minutes, five community members phoned in and expressed support for the custodial care program.
Wasson did not phone into the meeting because he did not know it was happening, much less that the idea of shutting down the program was being considered.
Wasson said he first learned that the program was closing its doors when he got a phone call from Arbor Health on Sept 6 — 11 days after the vote had been made — notifying him his mother would have to leave.
County Commissioner for District 3 Gary Stamper, who represents east Lewis County, did not return calls from The Chronicle for comment.
“There was no community notice,” Wasson said. “Now you could say, well, Jeffrey, you should have been watching the (Arbor Health) website, but that seems unreasonable to me.”
