State appoints 'temporary manager' for covid-stricken Beaver nursing home

State officials have entered into an agreement to appoint a temporary manager at the Beaver County long-term care facility where more than 50 people have died from covid-19.

The Long Hill Co., based in Shelton, Conn., became the temporary manager for the Brighton Rehabilitation and Wellness Center in mid-April, according to the state Department of Health press office.

“The department has been working with facilities that have seen significant outbreaks, including Brighton, as part of the work being done to assist nursing homes with outbreaks,” press office officials said in an email to the Tribune-Review. “Some of this work is being done by the department, some by ECRI, who we have contracted with, and some by other organizations.”

ECRI is a health care consultant based in Montgomery County, which is among the hardest-hit counties in the state with 4,307 cases and 351 deaths.

“This was a collaborative decision in terms of appointing a temporary manager,” state Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine said at her Thursday briefing. “The temporary manager is there to help us and help the staff in terms of taking care of patients, preventing further patients from getting covid-19 and caring for those that do.”

Levine said that the health department’s outreach to personal care homes and nursing homes “involves very frequent phone calls with (those) and other facilities.”

State health officials “do not believe that there were any serious red flags about the way Brighton has responded to the covid-19 cases seen at the facility,” the press office’s email reads. “These situations are not easy for anyone, and we know congregate care settings have been hit particularly hard, as evidenced by the data on our website.”

Long Hill’s website advertises it as a team of “executive-level professionals specializing in the turnaround of distressed health care organizations.”

Long Hill officials could be immediately reached for comment.

The agreement specifies that Brighton is paying for the temporary managerial services, rather than the state, health officials said.

Pennsylvania’s Title 35 empowers the state to step in and appoint temporary management when a health care provider “has failed to bring the facility into compliance within the time specified by the department, or when the facility has demonstrated that it is unwilling or unable to achieve compliance, such as would convince a reasonable person that any correction of violations would be unlikely to be maintained.”

State health officials said Brighton brought in a new administrator earlier this year to work through some of the other issues that have occurred at the facility in the past few years, including a scabies outbreak in 2019 among residents.

The facility had also spent the past 28 months on the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Special Focus Facility Program list, a nationwide list of nursing homes with more — and more serious — problems and inspection deficiencies than the national average.