Minnesota health officials have taken temporary control of operations at a Pine Island nursing home amid a series of financial and quality-of-care problems.
Minnesota takes charge of struggling Pine Island nursing home
Action taken after state found evidence that the home was repeatedly falling behind on paying wages, bills.
June 13, 2022 at 7:26PM
The state Department of Health said Monday that it had taken the rare step because financial delinquencies had jeopardized the quality of care at the 70-bed Pine Haven Care Center.
"The evidence indicated a need for immediate action to ensure that residents are safe and continue to receive essential services," Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm said.
The state sought an order by Ramsey County District Judge Leonardo Castro to place Pine Haven in receivership after an investigation found that the southeast Minnesota facility was late in paying workers and vendors.
The order described the nursing home as "compromised" and linked its financial problems to an event in May in which a resident with known allergies was fed peanut products and rushed to a hospital after an anaphylactic reaction.
Nursing homes have struggled over the past two years with staffing as well as the challenges of protecting workers and residents from coronavirus infections. Gov. Tim Walz mobilized hundreds of National Guard members to shore up staffing in nursing homes hit with COVID-19 outbreaks or workers leaving the profession.
The state has taken over nursing homes seven times in the past 15 years, including two during the pandemic. Last fall, it took charge of Twin City Gardens in Minneapolis before the struggling nursing home shut down in January.
Nursing homes had unique challenges before the pandemic, depending on their buildings, locations, employment bases and patient mix, said Maria King, director of the health department's regulation division. In the two years before the pandemic, Pine Haven had become much more dependent on temporary staffing agencies than its own full-time workers.
"I don't know that you could blame the pandemic for some of the issues," King said.
The state assumed financial responsibility for Pine Haven and appointed Pathway Health, a professional management organization, to temporarily take over its operations.
The move was taken in part to pay workers and prevent a staff exodus that would have left the nursing home's 52 residents with inadequate supervision.
Pine Haven had a string of top four-star ratings from 2019 through 2021, according to Minnesota's nursing home report card, for the quality of its state inspection results. This year, it received a one-star rating on that measure after a poor inspection last fall.
The inspection report documented women with long, unshaven chin hairs who were receiving inadequate hygiene care and residents with urine-saturated undergarments who hadn't been taken regularly from their beds or wheelchairs to bathrooms.
All deficiencies in care had been resolved at the time of a December follow-up inspection.
King said the nursing home has strengths, including its building and a supportive local community. Administrator Marcus Parence was honored by Pine Island last June for taking charge of the nursing home in 2020 and leading it through the pandemic.
"It was such an uncertain time, and you're … not trying to be the first or one of the first in Minnesota to have an outbreak," Parence recalled about the early days of the pandemic in an interview published by the Rochester Post-Bulletin.
Parence in an e-mail referred questions about the receivership to the health department.
The state will seek a permanent solution for the home before the receivership ends in 18 months.
"The goal going into receivership is to help support the facility," King said, "to kind of get back on track."
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