In late October, my 97-year-old mother was evicted from the senior care facility in New Berlin, Wisconsin, where she had lived for a decade. It happened from one day to the next, in an apparent violation of state law. My family had to scramble to find her a new place to live.
Like the federal law governing nursing homes nationwide, Wisconsin law requires providers including the Regency, where my mother lived, to give residents 30 days advance notice before an involuntary discharge. We received no such notice and, as I learned in researching an article on this subject, most people evicted from nursing homes and other long-term care facilities don’t.
“It is rare for a resident to ever get 30 days’ notice,” Tony Chicotel, a staff attorney for California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, told me. That’s because doing so involves informing residents of their right to appeal, which facilities don’t want because residents who do appeal usually win.
