Nursing Assistant Resources On The Web

Not good. I suspect we will be reading more about this in the coming weeks. (I hope so anyway).

The tales found in the Texas Department of Aging and Disability Service’s disciplinary files can be savage, sad and stomach-turning. But they are intended to serve an essential purpose: protecting Texas grandparents, disabled children and the terminally ill from abusive or dishonest nurse aides and other caregivers.

But dangerous blind spots plague the system that oversees them, a Star-Telegram examination has found. Across the state, caregivers facing discipline for sexual misconduct, theft, abuse — and a fatal case of neglect — were all able to find and hold new jobs.

Consider this: The department has banned about 680 people — for life — from working at any of the facilities it regulates. Yet every two years, the department renews the certifications of some of those same workers as nurse aides. One San Antonio aide, blacklisted for stealing an elderly man’s identity in 2005, has a new certification good through 2009. A Lubbock aide banned for swindling an elderly woman out of more than $100,000 works for a healthcare staffing company and insists she’s not caring for patients — “We do billing,” she said. Another, banned for neglect, was fired from a Plano nursing home only after the Star-Telegram questioned her status in August.

Just how do those workers keep getting recertified? All the state requires for renewal is evidence that an aide is still working.

So if a blacklisted aide continues to hold a job and sends that evidence to the state, no one checks to see whether they should be working before issuing the renewal.