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Long-Term Care Facility Class Action Lawsuit Overview:
- Who: Workers at a long-term care facility that experienced one of the country’s deadliest outbreaks lodged a lawsuit against the home’s operators.
- Why: The workers claim that management put them at risk with “criminally catastrophic decisions” that resulted in more than 80 staff members contracting COVID-19.
- Where: Holyoake Soldiers is located in Massachusetts.
Workers at a long-term care facility that experienced one of the country’s deadliest outbreaks of COVID-19 allege in a class action lawsuit that management at the home put their lives in danger.
The class action lawsuit was filed by certified nursing assistant Kwesi Ablordeppey on behalf of his coworkers alleging that the facility’s management violated the workers’ civil rights, Western Mass News reports.
Ablordeppey previously told the news outlet that during the pandemic he had to put people in body bags in and store the bodies in refrigerator trucks.
Deadly COVID-19 Outbreak at Long-Term Care Facility
The long-term care facility’s management “made a series of criminally catastrophic decisions that led to the slow, agonizing, and preventable deaths of seventy-seven (77) veterans,” says the class action lawsuit.
It adds that 83 staff members contracted COVID-19.
Holyoke Soldiers Home also faces a class action lawsuit filed by residents and their loved ones who say the facility did not do enough to stem the outbreak.
Counsel for the workers, Leonard Kesten, told Western Mass News that what management did at Holyoake Soldiers was “beyond negligence.”
“You know, they took affirmative steps to damage the health of people.”
Management misrepresented the gravity of COVID-19’s effects and transmission, and punished employees for wearing personal protective equipment, claims the long-term care facility class action lawsuit. These misrepresentations, the workers argue, exceed a typical worker’s compensation claim and constitute a violation of the workers’ civil rights.
“It’s a high bar. It can’t just be negligence. It has to shock the conscience and we believe that that bar has been met here,” the lawyer representing the long-term care facility workers told reporters.
The trauma wasn’t just physical, the class action lawsuit states, with long-term care facility workers facing deep emotional trauma with staff having to watch “in horror as the veterans asked God to let them die.”
The long-term care facility class action lawsuit names former Superintendent Bennett Walsh and the former medical director and three upper-level nursing managers as defendants in the case.
The superintendent and former medical director also face criminal neglect charges after a coronavirus outbreak at the facility led to the deaths of dozens of residents.
Ablordeppey wants to represent other long-term care facility workers employed at the Soldiers’ Home during COVID-19.
Do you think the workers at the home should get damages from the Soldiers’ Home? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section!
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