The Gowrie nursing home has been cited twice in 3 months for failing to protect residents.
A central Iowa nursing home has been fined for failing to protect residents from a registered sex offender for the second time in three months.
Eighty-year-old sex offender John Steinkamp was found in bed with another resident at the Gowrie Care Center on Sept. 27 — and that resident alleged the two had just engaged in some type of sexual activity.
That incident prompted the the federal government’s Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services to impose a fine of $50 for each day the Gowrie Care Center failed to comply with health and safety regulations related to its supervision of Steinkamp. The daily fine was lifted Nov. 18, resulting in a total penalty of $2,150.
The home’s owner, Bruce H. Mehlhop of Johnston’s Signature Care Centers, said the incident involving Steinkamp “did not result in any actual harm or negative outcome to any residents of the facility.”
He said Gowrie Care Center has “implemented additional procedures” to come into compliance with minimum care standards for its 30 residents.
Iowa policymakers have been struggling with the issue of sex offenders in care facilities since 2011, when The Des Moines Register started reporting on problems related to the 42 offenders living in Iowa’s care facilities for the elderly and disabled.
Steinkamp has lived at the Gowrie Care Center since February 2011. He has three convictions for lascivious acts with children, the most recent from 2008.
State records show that earlier this year the home updated Steinkamp’s care plan to include staff awareness of his whereabouts at all times. The plan also called for an alarm on the door to his room, so the staff would know when he left.
A separate “Sex Offender Safety Plan” called for 30-minute status checks on his location in the home.
But in August, state inspectors visited the home and watched as Steinkamp observed and then moved toward a visiting child who was in the home playing catch with a staffer.
The inspector intervened and the state then imposed a $500 fine for failing to follow its safety plan.
Days later, the facility’s Quality Assurance Committee addressed the matter not by increasing Steinkamp’s supervision but by revising the safety plan to remove the requirements for staff monitoring and 30-minute checks.
Five weeks after that change was made, on Sept. 27, a nurse aide reported that she entered the room of Steinkamp and his roommate and found the two in bed together.
The two were clothed, but the aide said the roommate reported that a sexual encounter — unspecified in the state inspection report — had taken place. Steinkamp denied anything had happened.
Steinkamp was immediately moved to a different room. That same day, the 30-minute checks were reinstituted.
When a state inspector visited the home six days later, on Oct. 3, she saw that Steinkamp’s new room was next door, and on the same side of the hallway, as his alleged victim. It was also the farthest distance from the nurses’ station, which faced the opposite direction. The director of nursing acknowledged that Steinkamp had been continuing to try to enter the room of his alleged victim.
Steinkamp then showed the inspector how he could easily silence the alarm that had been placed on his door. A nurse at the home told the inspector Steinkamp had left his room unnoticed on at least one occasion the previous week.
The inspector watched as Steinkamp walked up to the room of his alleged victim, opened the door, muttered, “Not my room,” and then walked toward his own room. Despite the presence of a state inspector in the building, no employees of the home were in the vicinity.
The facility’s director of nursing told inspectors that Steinkamp had been placed in a dual-occupancy room because his past victims had always been young male children. She acknowledged the door alarm offered no protection for anyone who had to share a room with Steinkamp, and that placing the two in adjacent rooms after the alleged incident was less than ideal.
A few days later, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services began imposing the daily $50 fine. It also temporarily suspended payment for all new admissions of Medicaid-dependent residents.
As a result of the federal sanctions, a proposed state fine of $1,500 will not be imposed.
In each of the past two legislative sessions, Iowa lawmakers debated measures to address the problem of sex offenders living in care facilities alongside vulnerable seniors or disabled adults. Some favored legislation that would have required homes to notify residents and their families if a sex offender was living in the facility. Others wanted to see a law passed that would prohibit traditional, privately run care facilities from housing violent criminals or sex offenders. Ultimately, neither proposal was approved.
“It was a knife fight between those individuals with competing views on the issue, and that is what basically killed everything,” said Rep. Clel Baudler, a Greenfield Republican. “But as these incidents continue to come up again and again, it’s more likely that we’ll have to look at this issue again.”
In 2010, sex offender Michael Ogden was convicted of sexually assaulting several of his fellow residents at the Pride Group care facility in Le Mars. In Anamosa, three men who lived at the Fairview care facility were accused of repeatedly sexually assaulting a female resident of the home.
In 2011, convicted sex offender William Cubbage was accused of sexually assaulting a 95-year-old woman at the Pomeroy Care Center.
In 2012, a resident of the Prairie View Residential Care Facility in Fayette was allegedly beaten to death by a fellow resident, Matthew T. Braun, who has a long history of criminal violence.
Gov. Terry Branstad has favored the notification legislation. Opponents have argued that notification would offer little or no protection to residents, particularly those who have no family or have diminished mental capacity. ..Source.. by Clark Kauffman
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