Iowa Nursing Home Cited for Denying Final Visit To Family

One of the hardest things to watch during the pandemic has been people with older loved ones confined to nursing homes not being able to visit them. Most have not allowed general visits, but in end-of-life scenarios, an exception is often made. The cruelty of the virus is one thing, but human, or more like inhumane cruelty runs deep in the story of a Guthrie Center facility who was recently fined over $3,000.

A patient in hospice care at New Homestead in Guthrie Center had started to "mottle" which according to KCRG is a skin clotting disorder that's common to heart failure patients near death. The family wanted to see the patient before she died, knowing it was close, but their request was not only denied, but quite harshly at that.

The Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals fined the facility $3,250 for "failure to ensure resident rights were met due to a resident not allowed to have family visit during the end of life". An hour before Betty Hansen died, her daughter called New Homestead once again begging to visit. New Homestead normally allows end-of-life visits but in this case, for some reason, did not. The phone call was reportedly greeted with "it's not time yet". The daughter, who is identified in a Des Moines Register story as Cindy Lyons, said her biggest fear was to "watch her mother die through a window". Sadly, it seems she wasn't even granted that.