LEGAL LIABILITY COSTS SURGE FOR US NURSING HOMES TODD ZWILLICH, REUTERS - The costs paid by nursing homes to defend against patient lawsuits has more than doubled since 1997 and is threatening to drain the industry of sorely needed money, an industry-sponsored report suggests. The report blames the huge cost increase on a series of factors, including increasingly frequent state lawsuits alleging negligent care of elderly residents, larger jury awards and skyrocketing premiums charged by insurance companies for liability coverage.

I feel no pity for the nursing home industry. I work at a large hospital in Ohio, and my patient population is largely shifted towards those over forty years of age - a significant number of whom are from nursing homes. In my section, patients come from the nursing home and are often there for four or more hours while we complete their testing.

When I began working here a year ago, it was not uncommon for the nursing home staff to simply drop patients off - often with dementia, unable to control themselves, and even sometimes confined to a stretcher - without anyone to aid or assist them during their time in an *outpatient* clinic. These patients, scared, disoriented, and often left without any means of getting a meal during their time at the hospital, often meant that we had to try to take care of them as best we could, with sketchy documentation of their illness, while trying to deal with a full schedule of regular patients that already taxed us to the limit. On the few occasions that there was someone to care for them, those nursing home staff members were uniformly rude - both to the hospital staff and to the patient.

The final straw - for me, at least - was one patient who was literally abandoned in a hallway by nursing home staff. None of us knew who she was, or what she was there for, and the patient was completely incoherent [through no fault of her own; I won't describe more than that to preserve her privacy].

It literally took my threatening to report these instances as elder abuse for things to change at the hospital. Now our policy is that nursing homes patients cannot be simply abandoned; they must have a caregiver with them. Without this change, I'm sure things would still be the same.

My fiancee and I will never, no matter what, turn our parents over to a nursing home. I've seen how too many of them treat their patients. They bear as much resemblance to a place of caring as a 1810 sanatorium bears to a modern psychologists' office.

There's a reason why lawsuits against nursing homes have increased. They deserve it.