From June 2013 to June 2014, the Verdugo Valley Skilled Nursing & Wellness Centre willfully falsified a resident’s medical records by documenting physician’s orders from a physician who did not give the orders or serve as the resident’s physician.
The facility record falsely reflected the care and services to this resident, documenting numerous communications with and medical orders from this physician that never took place. The physician never visited the resident in the facility and never wrote or called orders for the resident’s care.
The physician told the investigator that the resident was not his patient and that he had never been to the facility. The orders could not be traced to any other physician and the resident was not under the care of a primary physician for over a year.
On December 14, 2015, the Department of Public Health cited the facility for willfully falsifying the resident’s records and issued a $10,000 fine.
This citation is apparently related to involuntary manslaughter charges Attorney General Kamala Harris filed against Verdugo Valley Skilled Nursing & Wellness Centre in August 2015 concerning the death of James Populus on August 30, 2014. The Attorney General announced the charges in an August 28, 2015 press release that described Mr. Populus’s care as “grossly negligent.”
Read the citation
Read the Attorney General’s August 28, 2015 press release
Read the Sacramento Bee’s September 19, 2015 article, Death of a Patient: State blames nursing home