After confusion this week about whether the state had imposed a “temporary manager” for a Beaver County nursing home battling the state’s worst outbreak of COVID-19, Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine on Friday tried to clear it up by declaring that the state will impose a temporary manager at the troubled facility.
“The situation at the [Brighton Rehabilitation and Wellness Center] nursing home has been very challenging,” she said during Friday’s online state news conference. “We are doing everything we can to try to help the patients and the staff at that facility.
“We had put in what we call a temporary manager, so this is voluntary, on behalf of the facility,” she added. “They’re calling it a consultant — it’s a little matter of semantics — but we are actually going to be placing in a state-chosen and state-funded temporary manager for that facility presently.”
Dr. Levine and the state said last week it had imposed a manager — a move that is very rare for the state to take for any facility.
On April 29 during the state’s daily online news conference, Dr. Levine announced that the state had placed a temporary manager at Brighton Rehabilitation two weeks earlier, on April 15.
State Department of Health spokesman Nate Wardle the next day, April 30, cited the state statute that gave the state authority to place that temporary manager at Brighton Rehabilitation, and explained that “the temporary manager provides support and oversight of operations at the facility” and that the manager was hired in agreement with Brighton’s owners.
The state statute essentially says that the state may impose a temporary manager if either the facility failed to come into compliance within a stated deadline, or that the state has decided that the facility is “unwilling or unable to achieve compliance.”
But confusion over what role the temporary manager — The Long Hill Company — actually had at Brighton Rehabilitation began almost immediately.
The Long Hill Company put out a release on April 30 saying that it was “not managing, operating or surveying the facility.”
Later the same day, Brighton’s owners put out a statement in which they also referred to Long Hill as a “consultant,” not a manager.
But that became even more confusing Thursday when Long Hill put out another clarification, explaining again that it was “retained as a consultant to provide a limited review of the practices and protocols of the facility.”
That prompted a reversal by the state Friday, with Mr. Wardle sending out a statement that declared that Long Hill was never a temporary manager at Brighton.
“Long Hill Company had a contract with Brighton Rehabilitation and Wellness Center as a consultant. The contract was not with the Department of Health. The department had recommended to Brighton that they should contact Long Hill to assist them,” Mr. Wardle wrote in an emailed statement. “The role that they played at the facility was similar to what the department would call a temporary manager. However, since we did not bring them into the facility, they were not acting as a temporary manager on behalf of the state in this instance.”
All of this came as local and statewide political leaders continued to put pressure on the state and federal government to investigate Brighton as the number of deaths there continued to rise.
Brighton has had 312 residents there test positive for COVID-19 and 71 of them have died, according to the state’s data update on Friday, in a building that held about 460 residents when the outbreak began in March. It also has had 21 staff members test positive.
Beaver County commissioners have asked for an investigation, U.S. senators Bob Casey and Pat Toomey have put pressure on the federal government to do more, and on Thursday U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb, D-Mt. Lebanon, who represents Beaver County, asked the federal government to investigate Brighton.
Sean D. Hamill: shamill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-2579 or Twitter: @SeanDHamill
First Published: May 8, 2020, 9:12 p.m.
