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For-profit rehabilitation hospitals are booming in the United States, but their rapid growth is leaving patient safety far behind.
The US post-acute care industry, which deals with rehab and long-term care facilities, was worth an estimated $483 billion in 2024, and is expected to grow to over $785 billion by 2034.
On paper, it's easy to assume all that business potential would translate to quality care. Unfortunately, for thousands of patients across the country, that couldn’t be further from the truth, as Encompass Health Corporation — the McDonald's of post-acute care, basically — makes clear.
Bombshell reporting by the New York Times this week uncovered a horrifying track record by Encompass and other for-profit rehab outfits. Though negligence in rehab facilities might not seem as overtly dangerous as it is in generic hospital settings, it often leads to injuries, unplanned readmissions to general hospitals, and even death.
At the Encompass facility in Jackson, Tennessee, for example, a 68-year-old patient was found lying in a pool of his own blood. Per the NYT, a pressure- and motion-triggered alarm meant to alert nurses if he left his bed had been turned off prior to the gruesome discovery.
A patient in Morgantown, West Virginia, died a similarly preventable death, after a fall off the bed gave her a "huge gash" on her forehead. There, too, the hospital chain's alarms failed to notify staff in time.
"We are having a lot of problems with the bed alarms," a nurse technician told police inspectors after the woman's death, according to an inspection report obtained by the NYT.
Another incident in South Dakota led to the death of a 73-year-old man when a nurse administered the wrong drug. That was just one of 26 adverse drug events the Encompass site was responsible for over the span of just six months.
Per the NYT, Encompass owns 168 hospitals, and was responsible for nearly 250,000 patients in 2024. In 2023, Encompass helped flip the rehabilitation sector from a mostly non-profit space to a predominantly profit-seeking one.
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