There seems to be no let-up of bad news for Niagara Rehabilitation & Nursing Center as just this week Channel 7 Eyewitness News reported yet another incident involving the facility, which has frequently been the target of state investigations over the years.
A patient named David Willis simply walked out the front door and was not discovered missing for seven hours, when he somehow turned up at Buffalo General Hospital.
Our attention in particular was drawn to the story, reported on by WKBW investigative journalist Charlie Specht, who has covered Niagara Falls for the Buffalo News, chiefly because Niagara Falls author and historian, and friend of this newspaper, Paul Gromosiak, figured prominently in the scandal.
“This is a scary place,” Gromosiak told Specht for his report, “They don’t know what the hell they’re doing, and those that are doing anything are haphazard about it.”
“Hell,” Gromosiak is said to have described Niagara Rehab as, “Yes h-e-l-l or, maybe purgatory, one or the other but more like Hell.”
According to the Channel 7 story, Gromosiak believed that nurses had made a mistake with his medication.
“I don’t know when I’m gonna get the hell out of here. And I hope nobody else dies,” he added.
It so happens that this writer and his girlfriend twice visited Gromosiak at Niagara Rehab during his recent stay there. And it was pretty much what everyone says it is. A madhouse.
People wandering around, in and out of rooms that they do not seem to belong in. Noise, and lots of it.
Gromosiak told us that he had fallen down in the middle of the night, and called out, “Help! Help!” and after what seemed an interminable amount of time laying on the floor, when aides finally came, they yelled at him for making so much noise.
While multistory facilities have long been on the way out, due to the inherent fire hazard that they present, not so with Niagara Rehab. In addition, the floor on which Gromosiak was recuperating was, during both of our visits, so cluttered with med carts, food carts, laundry carts and patients sitting in wheelchairs, that to get through to his room, you had to walk single-file. It was a complete traffic jam. Clearly not a safe situation, fire safety-wise.
On one occasion, a med cart was in the hallway and as I walked past it, I could clearly read the confidential health history of the patient on the computer screen. Ever the jokester, I loudly proclaimed, “So much for HIPAA!” (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 that strictly regulates patient privacy) within earshot of several staffers who, to their credit, immediately darkened the screen.
“It is also our hope that anyone reporting will hold themselves to these same professional standards and fully investigate claims, including diagnosis and history, prior to making public statements in a misguided attempt at ratings,” sniped hired gun PR man Kevin Keenan, who you may remember as Jimmy Glynn’s preferred mouthpiece when it came to justifying his new Ciminelli-built boatyard in the Niagara Gorge and castigating international water authorities for shutting the Maid down for a couple of hours to alleviate potential flood conditions above the falls.