Med Mal News

On Sept. 20, Florida's Agency for Health Care issued a emergency order suspending the license of the Rehabilitation Center of Hollywood Hills, the Tallahassee nursing home where 11 people died in the days after Hurricane Irma struck Florida. The Agency for Health Care's Secretary Justin Senior stated in the suspension announcement that “[n]o amount of emergency preparedness could have prevented the gross medical and criminal recklessness that occurred at this facility.” The operators of the home claimed they were ignored when they asked for assistance from the State government when their generators went out, leaving the facility without air conditioning. And, in fact, it has been reported that several messages were left by the facility's operators with the governor's office prior to any heat-related deaths, but those messages were later deleted and have now been lost.

According to the order suspending the nursing home's operating license, the staff delayed calling 911 when patients began to fall ill, and they did not timely move the overheated residents across the street to an available air-conditioned hospital. When those people were finally evacuated, many arrived at the hospital too overheated to be saved — several of them with body temperatures in excess of 107 degrees. Compounding these egregious lapses, nursing staff reportedly lied about patients' conditions in their medical records, in one instance recording a patient's temperature as 101.6 degrees when that patient was across the street with a temperature above 108, and in another noting that a patient was peacefully resting in bed at the nursing home when that patient had already died in the hospital across the street.