Nursing Home Negligence Settlement is Given After Salmonella Outbreak*

Red Oak is a full service senior assisted living center, with a large number of activities for its nearly 240 residents, and it has a very large, industrial, dedicated kitchen for food preparation.

On three occasions, Red Oak's kitchen performed improper food preparation techniques, chopping vegetables on cutting boards and surfaces that had already been used to prepare meat. The result was a series of mild salmonella outbreaks among the residents, causing gastrointestinal distress and several visits to a hospital (for some of the frailer residents).

The causal chain of events was established by checking the disease vectors – the residents who got sick and developed a fever were all served from the same heating plate, which was traced back to the kitchen.

In addition to a health department down check, families of the residents chose to litigate against Red Oak Senior Living Center on behalf of residents whom had to be hospitalized for their symptoms, which included vomiting, nausea and severe dehydration.

All three residents recovered, though one had to be hospitalized for a month. Rather than risk a direct lawsuit and the bad publicity, Red Oak Senior Living center negotiated a nursing home negligence settlement of $20,000 per patient, and covered the medical expenses of all three victims.

As a condition of the nursing home negligence settlement, all food preparation and culinary staff had to take remedial food safety courses, covering cutting board discipline, the use of bottles of bleach to disinfect, and similar items.

Observers who worked in the kitchen gave questionable reports that the food service preparation area, while not unclean, was likely to be cluttered and busy when they were preparing meals in shifts. (The dining room at Red Oak can only hold one third of the residents at any one time, so meals are staged in shifts.)

In light of the Red Oak lawsuit & nursing home negligence settlement, the state regulatory board added two more pages of compliance check lists for all nursing homes, covering (and re-iterating) the nursing home industry's responsibility for the health and well being of their residents.