A 103-year-old woman with no terminal illness named Marian Leonard is being held at an Alabama hospice against her will, where her daughter says she’s not being properly fed and a state-appointed “guardian” has authorized doctors to give her powerful antipsychotic drugs despite no history of mental illness
According to Leonard’s daughter, Nancy Scott, and Life Legal Defense Foundation (LLDF), “the state of Alabama placed Marian in protective custody and appointed a third-party guardian to take over Marian’s care after erroneously believing Nancy moved her mother to home care against a doctor’s recommendation. Ms. Scott says she had the ‘full permission and blessing’ of the doctor to move her mother from a nursing home in Tennessee back to the family’s home town in Alabama.”
Over Scott’s “strong objections,” her mother was placed at Diversicare of Riverchase, a hospice facility in Jefferson County. Diversicare is a chain of nursing homes with dozens of centers around the Southeast. The company offers “short-term rehabilitation,” “complex medical care,” “long-term care,” “memory care,” “hospice care,” and “assisted living,” according to its website.
Scott is now prevented from seeing her mother more than twice a month for 1 1/2 hours per visit – and she’s only able to see her at all because of the work of her local attorney.
According to LLDF, “The last time Nancy (Scott) went to see her mother, Marian pleaded with her to take her home, saying, ‘If you don’t get me out of here, they’re going to kill me.’”
“We are appalled that Alabama’s Department of Human Resources would consign an elderly woman to a facility against her will and then allow her condition to deteriorate so rapidly,” said LLDF executive director Alexandra Snyder. “Life Legal will do whatever is in our power to ensure that Marian Leonard receives the care she needs, including frequent visits from her daughter.”
“I have heard that Marian is receiving better care at the nursing facility since we posted the story (on June 26),” Snyder told LifeSiteNews. “However, the guardian has not budged on visitation and we are concerned he may again prohibit Nancy from seeing her mother.”
Federal gov’t report: Diversicare of Riverchase wasn’t providing patients with regular showers
A 2018 federal inspection of Diversicare of Riverchase, conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, found “the facility failed to routinely provide showers as scheduled to residents who required ADL (Activities of Daily Living) assistance.”
The same deficiency report that revealed Diversicare of Riverchase wasn’t providing regular showers to patients who needed help bathing also indicated the facility violated numerous U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations. Diversicare of Riverchase failed to, among other offenses:
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