ALF Watchdog: I was fired for doing my job

Volunteer watchdog Bill Hearne predicted he’d be fired when he told a roomful of colleagues that their program was being deliberately dismantled by Tallahassee bosses who had become too cozy with the nursing home and assisted living facility industries they oversee.

Within six weeks, he was proved right.

Hearne has been jettisoned as part of what activists are calling a purge of inspectors who are serious about ferreting out abuse, neglect and filthy conditions.

The exodus comes in the wake of a series of stories in The Miami Herald, “Neglected to Death,’’ that documented the state’s failure to police the state’s 2,850 assisted living facilities, where residents suffered deadly bedsores, were strapped to their beds and ignored, locked in a closet, overmedicated, and in one case, eaten by an alligator after wandering away.

Hearne, a 74-year-old retired businessman, who was moved nearly to tears in November while recounting the abuse of elders in assisted living facilities, was “de-designated” as an inspector, meaning he no longer has authority to enter or inspect ALFs or nursing homes for the state Long-term Care Ombudsman Program, where he volunteered for four years. He is the latest of several such volunteers who either were fired or resigned in the wake of a statewide shake-up of the program.

Another volunteer from the Tampa Bay area, Rhodell J. “Del” Fields, resigned in November after, he says, program administrators berated him for speaking up at another meeting. “This is unfortunate,” he wrote in an email to the state’s top ombudsman, Jim Crochet, “as I still feel strongly about the plight of those Floridians residing in this state’s long-term care facilities.”

Erica Wilson, a spokeswoman for Crochet’s office, said he has the authority under federal law to both designate and de-designate volunteer inspectors. “As with any volunteer program, we work with our volunteers on a regular basis to ensure they are carrying out the duties required and are satisfied with the program as a volunteer opportunity,” said Wilson, who declined to specify why the two are no longer with the program.

“We also ask them to follow the program’s code of ethics. Volunteers who do not adhere to the rules and procedures of the program or who fail to satisfactorily perform their volunteer assignments may be reassigned or released from their position. Of course, releasing them from the program or de-designation is a last resort.”

The turmoil follows the release in September of a blistering report by the U.S. Administration on Aging that said Florida’s ombudsman program had been crippled by conflicts of interest and political meddling. The report said federal law does not allow state ombudsman agencies to muzzle their underlings.

Another outspoken watchdog, coordinator Clare Caldwell of Miami, was fired by Crochet a day after the release of that critical report — which said Florida was indeed discouraging its watchdogs from speaking out.

A spokeswoman for the Administration on Aging declined to comment on the departures.

Hearne’s troubles began in October when he, along with a handful of other South Miami-Dade volunteers, blasted Crochet’s decision to dramatically change the way volunteers inspect homes. In the past, volunteers were given free reign to inspect facilities. Crochet changed that, allowing volunteers to speak to residents — many of whom are either too mentally ill to articulate their concerns, or too afraid of retaliation to speak, advocates claim — but not to poke around looking for substandard conditions.

Suddenly off-limits were matters that once were the meat and potatoes of prior administrations, such as evidence of insects and rodents, dirty bed linens, unsanitary kitchens and bathrooms, medication errors and furniture that was too decrepit to support residents.

Hearne recounted a visit he took to an ALF where he was aghast watching a caregiver scream at an elderly man with Parkinson’s disease, a neurological disorder that made the man’s hands tremble and quake. When the man spilled his soup while struggling to grasp his spoon, the caregiver launched into a tirade.

“How would you like it if somebody spoke to your granddad like that?" Hearne asked.

Hearne repeated the story a month later when he spoke before a work group appointed by Gov. Rick Scott to recommend reforms of the state’s ALF program following the series in The Herald, which found 70 cases of death by abuse and neglect in homes since 2002.

Over and over again, the newspaper found, the state’s Agency for Health Care Administration, which has primary responsibility for policing ALFs, ignored violations of state law and allowed troubled homes to remain open and unpunished. Hearne criticized the new inspection policy yet again at a Nov. 15 meeting of South-Dade volunteers.

He was notified in writing that he’d been dumped from the program two weeks later.

He said the new policy amounts to “acceptance of whatever the facility owners want, regardless of the impact on our most vulnerable population.”

Fields, who is a professor emeritus of government and politics at St. Petersburg College, a position he took after a 22-year career in the U.S. Army, says he exchanged heated words with state Rep. Matt Hudson — a Naples Republican who has sponsored several bills that critics say would weaken the program — at an ombudsman meeting in Tampa Bay last November. Later, he said, he was “accosted” by the state’s deputy ombudsman and a local administrator. Fields said he was told his comments were “not consistent with the goals of the program.”

“It sounds like you are suggesting I should resign. Is that what I’m hearing?” Fields said he asked. “Yes,” he says the deputy replied. “That might be best.”

Larry Polivka, an expert on aging at Florida State University’s Claude Pepper Center who chaired the governor’s ALF work group, said he was not privy to the reasons behind Fields’ and Hearne’s departures. But, he added, if Hearne “got fired for speaking to us and saying what he said, I do not support it, and I find it disappointing.”