Federal nursing home regulators fined Cheltenham Nursing & Rehabilitation Center in Philadelphia $824,213 for failures connected to the June 2018 suicide of an elderly patient at the East Olney facility. It was the second-largest fine against a U.S. nursing home in 2018.
Cheltenham and its parent company, an Ohio nonprofit called the American Health Foundation Inc. (AHF) haven’t paid that fine, a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services spokesperson said.
The agency is still trying to collect the money.
Now, the U.S. Justice Department is also going after Cheltenham and two affiliated nursing homes in Ohio for even bigger stakes with a False Claims Act lawsuit, filed June 14 in Philadelphia. The suit alleges that the staff neglected patients for years and allowed them to live in a pest-infested building while AHF, which collected millions in management fees from Cheltenham, applied relentless pressure to cut nursing costs.
Additionally, the Justice Department accused Cheltenham of failing to provide needed psychiatric care — contributing to the 2018 suicide — giving residents unnecessary antibiotic and anti-psychotic medications, failing to protect residents’ belongings, and subjecting residents to verbal abuse.
“This is a really bad place,” said Toby Edelman, senior policy attorney in the Washington office of the nonprofit Center for Medicare Advocacy. “I couldn’t read it. I started getting so agitated,” Edelman said of the 144-page civil complaint.
Edelman and...
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