Brookdale Richmond Inflated Staff Numbers Class Action

A common complaint in class action against nursing homes is that they are understaffed and do not provide proper care for residents. This class action brings suit against Brookdale Richmond Place SNF in Kentucky, plus a long list of related entities and individuals, for misrepresenting the size of its staff and the number of hours they worked. 

The class for this action is all citizens of Kentucky who received care at the facility, from January 1, 2014 to the present, and their legal representatives.

The staffing of nursing homes and similar facilities should be dictated by not only the number of residents but the intensity of their needs. In general, a larger staff or a better staff-to-patient ratio means better care. Unfortunately, the complaint claims that Brookdale Richmond was not honest about the its staffing levels. 

The complaint claims that the notion that the facility had adequate staff was perpetrated by “false representations and/or omissions in advertising materials, in publication of daily work attendance, in communications with consumers and family members, in applying for, obtaining, and continuing licensure and certification … and in submitting false information to the Commonwealth of Kentucky in order to falsely inflate their Five Star Rating” in a system used by the public to compare nursing homes. 

In this rating system, the complaint says, “low performing health inspection scores could be offset by high staffing scores in the mathematical formula used to compute the overall Five Star Rating.” 

However, the staffing levels the facility reported were false, the complaint says. “Defendants were not in compliance with Kentucky statutes and regulations because Defendants did not have a certain level of staff to provide care for its residents.” To make them appear compliant, the complaint says, the administration inflated the number of staff in the buildings and the number of hours that they worked.

The complaint further claims that the defendants overreported the amount of money they spent on staffing “by millions of dollars per year” and that the money that should have been spent that way in fact “was siphoned out of the Facility to the other named corporate Defendants, as part of the scheme to defraud” those who lived at the facility or put their loved ones there.

The list of counts in the complaint is also long. They include fraud in the inducement, fraudulent representation, concealment, and nondisclosure, and negligent misrepresentation are included as well as civil conspiracy, joint enterprise, and concert of action, among other things. 

Article Type: Lawsuit
Topic: Consumer
Tags: Nursing Homes, Understaffing/Insufficient Care