Narcotics overdoses are becoming an increasing factor in brain injury cases nationwide, according to a fact-finding tour made by Ulster County legislators Monday night in Lake Katrine.
Members of the Health and Human Services Committee teamed up with Ulster County Coalition Against Narcotics (UCAN) to tour the insides of the local trauma center.
Each day, patients in this 280-bed nursing home struggle to recover basic motor skills and body functions. Some 180 are severely brain injured, with about 40 on ventilators, administrators told the group. And nearly seven percent got there from drug overdoses – a sharply increasing trend.It looks like just another looming rectangular building on the outskirts of Tech City, but the 205,000-square-foot Northeast Center for Rehabilitation and Brain Injury represents the largest facility of its kind in the entire world.
“We’re seeing the stark realities of traumatic brain injuries, surviving a heroin overdose, lives that are changed forever,” noted Legislator Carl Belfiglio, whose wife AnnMarie works as an occupational therapy coordinator at Northeast.
Belfiglio explained that he was prompted to take the tour after reading news reports about problems at Golden Hill nursing home in Kingston, formerly owned by the county. He said the committee should compile current ratings on every local facility.
While the facility is not under direct oversight of the county legislature, a large majority of its patient population is covered under Medicaid, due to the younger age of its growing number of drug overdose victims. UCAN Chairman Lou Klein is expected to deliver a report to the legislature on the narcotics impact.
County Legislator Craig Lopez, who is wheelchair-bound, wanted to see the parallel between a brain injury facility and physical injury center.
“I was in an accident when I was 18 years old,” Lopez said. “That was nearly 22 years ago. I spent three months at Westchester Medical Center and then I went to a rehab center for six months. The parallel I see between this one and Kessler is that I think the ultimate goal is to facilitate people back into the community and it’s nice to know that it doesn’t appear to be a permanent type facility, but more of a progressive facility to get people back into their communities.”
Facility administrator Seth Rinn criticized the state rating system, which includes an annual survey, staff analysis, and a 17-point quality measures review. The factors are boiled down into a simple five-star rating system devised by federal regulators, which overlooks important aspects of specialized care institutions like Northeast.
“We have a large population that are on anti-psychotic and anti-anxiety medications. In a typical nursing home, those kind of medications are frowned upon. In our environment, it’s very different, these medications are used as a therapeutic component, building their cognitive abilities,” Rinn said.
Northeast was established in the late 1990s by Anthony Salerno. After his death in 2008, the facility nearly lost its CMS certification due to violations. It is currently owned by NCRNC, LLC of Spring Valley, under Efraim Steif.
