In an elder abuse case described by one investigator as the most outrageous he has ever seen, three former top managers at a Kern County nursing home have been arrested in the deaths of three residents who allegedly were given needless doses of psychotropic medications.
The state attorney general's office contended in a criminal complaint that more than 20 residents at a skilled nursing center run by the Kern Valley Healthcare District were drugged "for staff convenience." Many of them experienced side effects that included dramatic weight loss, slurred speech, tremors, loss of cognition and even psychosis, according to the complaint.
Arraignment is scheduled this morning for the center's one-time medical director, Dr. Hoshang M. Pormir, former nursing director Gwen D. Hughes and former chief pharmacist Debbi C. Hayes. They were jailed in Bakersfield on Wednesday.
"These people maliciously violated the trust of their patients by holding them down and forcibly administering psychotropic medications if they dared to question their care," state Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown said.
All three have been charged with elder abuse. Hughes and Hayes, who are accused of administering shots by force and without consent, also face charges of assault with a deadly weapon.
The complaint paints a bleak picture of a facility dominated by nursing director Hughes, 55, who is accused of seeking to drug all but the most docile residents. Medical director Pormir, 48, allegedly rubber-stamped Hughes' orders for medication, failed to examine patients and was "either willfully or naively ignorant" of his proper role, according to the complaint. Pharmacist Hayes, 51, told investigators that she went along because Hughes had wide experience in psychiatric hospitals, the complaint says.
Hughes had been fired from a convalescent home in Fresno in 1999 for allegedly overmedicating patients there, according to state officials.
At the Kern Valley facility in Lake Isabella, she ordered medications when the elderly residents -- most of whom had dementia or Alzheimer's -- glared at her or spoke disrespectfully, according to Samuel Obair, a pharmacist who helped in the state's investigation.
"It is beyond appalling to me," he told state officials. "I have never gone into a facility and seen psychotropic medications and mood stabilizers . . . being used on so many patients, and so blatantly" without a legitimate diagnosis or careful documentation.
