SHAMEFUL! California Public Health Finds MPTF Broke Laws

Reaction is starting to come in about the new California Department Of Public Health inspection of the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s skilled nursing facility completed on June 4, 2010 citing the MPTF for rights violations and service failures. (The full report here.):

Ken Howard, President of Screen Actors Guild

The recent news regarding the legal violations attributed to the transfer of MPTF Long Term Care residents are troubling on many levels. Most importantly, these are our brothers and sisters in the entertainment industry who have entrusted their care to us. We cannot and must not abandon them. The entertainment industry has always set an example for the rest of the world on charity, diversity, and compassion. Now we have a chance to show how we tend to our own.

It wasn’t long ago that SAG took a vote that affirmed our support of the residents and family members who are fighting to keep the Long Term Care unit open. I urge all members of SAG and the entertainment industry to stand firm to the principles that founded the MPTF. “We take care of our own” has meaning to us all.

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MPTF Family Council:

The Long Term Care Family Council has been standing up for the rights, health and emotional well-being of family members and industry colleagues living at the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills. Our concerns about rising numbers of avoidable resident injuries, inappropriate and excessive use of prescription drugs, poor facility maintenance, sub-standard food service and, more recently, severe resident weight loss have been systematically ignored or denied by MPTF board leadership and management. The California Department of Public Health’s recently completed annual inspection report confirming these and other MPTF service failures as well as violations of state and federal law is devastating but also gratifying because it validates the veracity of the Family Council’s long standing concerns about MPTF practices that compromise the health, safety, and rights of Long Term Care residents. The DPH report, when viewed side by side with the MPTF’s many unequivocal written denials of service failures, illuminates institutional hubris and loss of mission focus that demands sweeping changes in MPTF management in order to refocus the charity on its historic promise to “take care of our own”.

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Saving the Lives of Our Own and the
Long Term Care Family Council

WOODLAND HILLS, CALIFORNIA: As a result of California Department of Health (CDPH) findings that the MPTF violated state law and the rights of the elderly when it relocated MPTF nursing home residents to other facilities and, in view of serious health care deficiencies also revealed in the report, Saving the Lives of Our Own (STLOOO) and the Long Term Care Family Council (LTCFC) demand the immediate ousting of the Fund’s top administrators.

Nancy Biederman, co-founder of Saving the Lives of Our Own issued the following statement on behalf of that group’s grassroots coalition of family members, industry workers, and community supporters:

“The time is long overdue for the MPTF’s Board of Trustees to act responsibly and restore the trust our industry placed in their stewardship to adhere to and strengthen our charity’s historic founding mission. In the Fund’s overzealous efforts to evict the vulnerable elderly residents from the home they were assured would be theirs for life, those in position of authority crossed the moral and ethical boundaries of human decency.”

The statement goes on to say: “The immediate resignation of all in authority responsible for these violations and deficiencies must be demanded. CDPH findings speak for themselves and serve as a wake-up call to those in positions of leadership that they will be held accountable.” Ms. Biederman added: “It is important for us to remember that our privileged industry, as a whole, has a moral responsibility and a decades-long commitment to honor the promise that “WE TAKE CARE OF OUR OWN”.

Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.