Editorial: Who answers for Brighton Rehab?

Death is not an unfamiliar visitor at a nursing home.

For some, the point of such a facility is to recover from a disease or an injury that is hard to manage at home without constant assistance. For others, the support is both more long-term and less transitional. It is something more than rehabilitation and less than hospice. It can be a place people go to live their remaining days.

But death should still just visit. It shouldn’t haunt the hallways the way it did at Brighton Rehabilitation and Wellness Center in Beaver County during the worst part of the coronavirus pandemic.

“I listen to the aides cry about not having enough help. I feel like I’m in prison. I don’t want to die here,” said Ken Miller, a former Pittsburgh artist confined to a wheelchair who now lives at Brighton, where 73 residents and one staff member died and more than 400 others have tested positive.

That is no way to live, even in the heightened anxiety of covid-19.

The problem is that it isn’t just about the pandemic. A Tribune-Review investigation published Sunday showed more than Brighton’s coronavirus deaths. It showed years of inspections with problems including infection control. It showed years on a federal watch list for poor performance. It showed half the state and national average of care provided to residents.

All of that is bad. But what might be worst is Brighton’s communications problems.

Six years ago, Beaver County owned the nursing home. Since putting it in private hands, officials say they have heard little from the web of owners. That’s the communication that isn’t happening.

The communication that does happen has reportedly included intimidation and fear. Miller was wheeled away and the door slammed when he spoke to a Trib reporter.

“I would sit there for hours on Facebook Live and say, ‘Please help us in Beaver. Please help us at Brighton Rehab.’ I would type it over and over and over again,” said Judith Minegar of Sewickley, whose mother is a resident and contracted covid-19. “I tried to get the (resident advocates) to help me. There was no help.”

The problem extends outside the walls. Repeated requests for interviews with Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine were ignored until after the deadline for the story. Auditor General Eugene DePasquale called the health department “frustratingly slow” in making changes he recommended not earlier this year but in 2016 and again in 2019.

Perhaps the only call that was answered and made a difference was when the department opted to take the extreme move of putting in a temporary state-appointed manager in May. That was the same time that the state did what states do in natural disasters and called in the Pennsylvania National Guard to help for a week.

A nursing home should never reach the point that the government puts it on the same footing as a flood or an earthquake.

Death may be a frequent visitor at nursing homes, but so is the law and medical ethics, compassion and respect. And if all that fails, there should always be someone to answer questions and answer for mistakes.