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| Edward Lisoski and his wife, Leona, were married 63 years |
Edward Lisoski was a spirited 92-year-old former Marine who entered the Martha T. Berry Medical Care Facility in Mount Clemens on June 4, hoping the county-run nursing home could help him regain enough strength so that he could maybe walk or drive again.
But after a series of “horrendous” incidences of alleged neglect by the staff, Lisoski’s family was stunned seven weeks later to learn that he had died.
Now, the son, daughter and widow of this World War II veteran from Sterling Heights are demanding answers about his death and why their numerous complaints about mistreatment were not properly addressed by Martha T. Berry medical personnel.
In a letter to the three-member board that controls the facility, the family wrote: “The pain, suffering and neglect he endured during his last seven weeks on earth at your facility (was) as shocking as it was inexcusable.”
County officials are scrambling to determine the sequence of events during Lisoski’s stay at Martha T. Berry, with a doctor and the director of nursing assigned to review the case.
But the director of the 217-bed facility, Jennifer Morgan, said she believes that many of the family’s grievances contain “a lot of inconsistencies and a lot of inaccuracies” compared to the charts maintained by medical staff that chronicled Lisoski’s daily care.
The Lisoski family’s crusade comes at a time when the nursing home’s board is engaged in a court fight with County Executive Mark Hackel and the facility has been hit with fines and poor ratings due to shortcomings in the care offered.
Lisoski, active in numerous community and political groups, suffered serious health setbacks prior to his stay at Martha T. Berry. He had kidney disease and underwent dialysis three times a week; circulation problems led to the amputation of his left leg below the knee three years ago; and when walking on his artificial leg became too difficult a few months ago, he began using a wheelchair.
The letter sent to county officials last week is based on an extensive journal kept by Lisoski’s daughter, Sherry Lisoski Williamson, during his time as a patient, from June 4 to July 27.
Among the many concerns and “gnawing questions,” the journal offered this horrific version of events:
• On July 22, Lisoski soiled himself at 4:30 p.m. The staff told the family that they were short-handed, and the patient was not cleaned up until 9 p.m.
• On June 16, Father’s Day, Lisoski received a large contingent of family visitors but he was so overmedicated that he couldn’t speak and couldn’t stay awake.
• On July 1, Lisoski started bleeding after a dialysis treatment and was hospitalized at Troy Beaumont Hospital. It apparently took the Martha T. Berry staff five hours, until 10 p.m., to realize he was missing. He returned to the county facility on July 4 and was assigned to the third of four different rooms during his 7-week stay. On July 7, his wife, Leona, discovered that he had not been served dinner. The family then learned that he had not been placed on a meal-delivery list for the staff since his room-switch three days earlier.
• On July 23, some 24 hours after his assigned doctor had prescribed morphine for Lisoski’s increasingly intense pain, the night staff was unaware of that new protocol and would only administer Tylenol.
• Lisoski’s call button to alert a nurse when in discomfort was constantly left on the floor next to his bed, where he could not reach it. When his wife and son raced to Martha T. Berry at 5:45 a.m. on July 27 after being alerted that Lisoski was unresponsive, they arrived to find the call button on the floor again. They were later told that he had died in his sleep, apparently from kidney failure.
“I think this is heartbreaking and absolutely unacceptable. It’s symptomatic of a larger issue,” said Assistant County Executive Al Lorenzo, who added that County Executive Mark Hackel was “deeply disturbed” by the family’s letter. “I … can tell you, if this was one of our departments and we had complaints like this, we would be all over it.”
The lawsuit underway in Macomb Circuit Court contains assertions by the county Human Services Board (formerly the Social Services Board) that oversees Martha T. Berry that they alone call the shots at medical facility. They claim that Hackel has no authority in this matter and that provisions in the voter-approved county charter do not apply to them.
In 2009-10, the Human Services Board earned high praise from county commissioners for gradually eliminating a multi-million dollar budget deficit at Martha T. Berry, which receives almost all of its funding from Medicare and Medicaid.
In May, Morgan, the director and administrator, received a prestigious Athena Award in recognition of improvements she put into place at the medical facility.
Earlier this year, Martha T. Berry was selected by the state to participate in a pilot program that seeks to reduce costs and increase efficiency for nursing homes with low-income patients.
But, according to the Medicare.gov website, Martha T. Berry has received a “much below average” rating – one out of five stars – based on government inspections and staffing levels. These nationwide rankings of nursing homes are based, in part, on consumer surveys.
In addition, state authorities have hit Martha T. Berry with seven fines totaling more than $80,000 over the past two years for violating nursing home standards.
In a two-paragraph response to the Lisoski family, Roger Facione, chairman of the Human Services board, assured them that the care Edward Lisoski received will be reviewed.
Every county in Michigan is served by a medical care facility like Martha T. Berry and most counties have their own separate facility. These county-run nursing homes are designed as a “safety net” for low-income patients who cannot afford expensive private facilities.
More like a nursing home than a hospital, Martha T. Berry, which opened in 1949 and is located on the outskirts of Mount Clemens, serves as home to some of Macomb County’s most chronically ill residents. The patients, ranging from teenagers to senior citizens, require long-term care due to accident, illness or disease that has left them paralyzed, comatose or incapacitated.
Lisoski’s son, Dennis, a Macomb Township resident, said that the family agreed in June to switch his father from a Shelby Township nursing home to Martha T. Berry because they toured the county facility and found an impressive “state-of-the-art” nursing home where promises were made to improve Edward Lisoski’s health. The facility had undergone a $22 million renovation several years ago.
What the family did not realize, Dennis Lisoski asserted, is that some of the staff – nurses, nurse aides and social workers -- were indifferent or incompetent. The staffers assigned to watch over the elderly Lisoski kept changing, and the night staff frequently blamed the day staff for mistakes, and vice versa.
The daughter, Lisoski Williamson, said the family, including a niece that is a nurse, gathered for three meetings with high-ranking staff but the conditions for her father rarely improved.
She said she expected the county to engage in “damage control” if the story about her father ever became public.
But she commented that the Lisoskis are determined to ensure that the treatment received by their father, a “proud Marine,” will cause Martha T. Berry to re-evaluate their operations and that other families will be spared the emotional distress that they suffered.
“My goal is to make sure no other resident is treated with such a lack of dignity and with such apathy,” said Lisoski Williamson, a resident of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. “My father had a zest for life … and he was well-respected. He didn’t deserve to have things end this way.”
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