Allegations of abuse of a nursing home patient

BRANDON, MS (Mississippi News Now) - A Rankin County woman is accusing a nursing home of abusing her elderly mother.

It is an allegation officials at the Brandon facility deny.

Betty Lovern Chambers has posted pictures on her Facebook page that show injuries her Tommi Lovern, 74, suffered last week.

"I feel strongly in my heart that it is abuse and neglect," Chambers said.

She said a nurse at the Brandon Nursing Home & Rehabilitation Center called her at 1:30 a.m. on January 25th telling her that her mother was admitted to the hospital after she fell from her wheelchair.

"I went over to the nursing home to confront the nurse on duty which was Crystal Wheaton...Her exact words to me were 'I had had enough," Chambers said. "So I gave her an Ativan to calm her down, and I didn't want her to wake the other residents."

The Pearl resident believes the nurse forcibly moved her mother in the wheelchair.

The customer service representative said the elderly mother of four, who is in the early stages of Dementia, suffered a fractured eye and injuries to her left arm and shoulder.

Lovern was released from the hospital Friday morning and returned to the nursing home but placed in a different unit.

According to Chambers, the staff makes frequent calls informing her that her mother often falls.

She told WLBT that her mother was also injured at the facility in late 2010.

"They called me and said that she was going over to the hospital because she had fallen. Well in that fall she had broken her arm," Chambers said.

"We're not in a position to make any comment," said Raymond Burgett, Brandon Nursing Home & Rehabilitation Center Executive Director. "Any allegation of abuse of that magnitude we are required to report to the Mississippi Department of Health and the Attorney General's Office."

When asked if Burgett indeed made the reports to those agencies, he said he could not make any comment.

"This is why we depend on nursing homes and good doctors and nurses. It's what we need to help those that can't do it," Chambers said.

Lovern has lived at the facility for about four years.

She was a retired machinist who lived in Richland before becoming ill and moving into the center.

Chambers and her family have filed a complaint with the Attorney General's Office and plan to file criminal charges, as well as take legal action.

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