Finding Care for an Aging Parent Can Be an Ordeal in Itself

When her 90-year-old father failed to regain full mental capacity after hip surgery last year, Westlake resident Jan Hickenbottom was faced with a difficult decision.

She needed to find a board-and-care facility for her dad. She wanted some place close to home. She wanted some place clean, safe and affordable.

But that was no easy task.

“It was just a nightmare,” she said, recalling her struggle to find an adequate care facility for her ailing father after removing him from a home that is now under investigation by state regulators.

“There are probably a lot of people who have had my experience,” said Hickenbottom. “But until you’re faced with it, you can’t know how difficult it is.”

Increasingly, people like Hickenbottom are being confronted with hard choices about where and how to find adequate housing and health care for their aging parents.

Largely unregulated by government agencies, in-home care can be terribly expensive and even dangerous for elders who are sometimes abused, neglected or financially exploited.

Nursing homes are no less pricey, and, according to a recent report to Congress, no less risky.

One in three California nursing homes is plagued by “serious or life-threatening” problems and fails to provide even the most basic levels of care, according to a federal Government Accounting Office report released last month.

Reacting to those findings, both state and federal officials have vowed better enforcement and oversight.

In Ventura County, where state funding for elder services has lagged, the issue is of growing importance.

Affordable housing is already in short supply, and senior-service programs that provide transportation, meals and day care are struggling to meet current demand with limited funding.

“There are a number of issues,” said Colleen House, director of the county’s Area Agency on Aging, a federally funded umbrella group for elder services. Not the least among them, she said, is the need for safe and affordable care facilities.

The agency’s advisory council intends to address that issue at an upcoming meeting, which will include discussion of recent allegations of neglect at the board-and-care home where Hickenbottom’s father had lived.

“It is a two-sided coin,” House said of the decisions adult children face in choosing care for their parents.

As much as some may want to take care of their ailing parents at home, health problems can demand professional care. Said House, “Frequently, you’ll have a person who has to go into a board-and-care facility.”

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That was the case for Hickenbottom.

In July 1997, her father fell and broke his hip. Although he had been in extremely good health, Hickenbottom said, after undergoing surgery he never recovered full mental capacity, as a result of the anesthesia.

Initially, he went into rehabilitation at Simi Valley Hospital. But when those treatments were completed, Hickenbottom, who works full time in Los Angeles County, had to find housing and continuing care for her father.

“They gave me a list of board-and-care facilities,” she recalled during an interview. There were only two that had openings, and she picked Halina’s Residential Care in Thousand Oaks.

Halina’s is one of four family-operated homes that was shut down by state regulators in June. An 86-year-old woman died after being hospitalized with a deep bedsore and other injuries that had gone untreated at the facility, according to state social services officials.

The operator, Grazyna “Grace” Baran, has contested the closure, and a hearing is set for October. Through her attorney, she has repeatedly declined to comment on the case. In the meantime, Ventura County prosecutors have launched their own investigation.

Hickenbottom, who has been in contact with local prosecutors, said she notified state officials last winter after her father sustained four broken ribs while living at Halina’s.

“I am not an irrational person. I was just trying to protect my father,” she said. “We’d come over and he’d have a new bruise every few days. . . . As soon as I could get him out of there, I did.”

Eventually, she moved her father to another facility--at a monthly cost of $3,750. When the price became more than Hickenbottom could afford, she sent her father to a $2,200-a-month care facility in Iowa, where her sister lives.

“We had no choice but to take him back there because the care out here was so expensive,” she said.

Her father, who had lived in Iowa most of his life, is happier now, she said. “He’s back in the area where he feels comfortable.”

But Hickenbottom is still unnerved by what happened to the 86-year-old woman who moved into Halina’s and died not long after her father moved out. “I was so upset that I couldn’t do something to prevent it,” she said.