Family members sue Billings nursing home for neglect while it was raking in profits during COVID

Canyon Creek Memory Care Community in Billings, Montana (Photo by Darrell Ehrlick of the Daily Montanan).

Mary Ann Simons had a stroke and was unable to communicate or eat or drink independently, but court documents allege that she was left alone with food and water — and no ability to feed or drink for herself.

In another case, residents started losing weight but staff stopped doing weekly weight checks until the State of Montana ordered them to resume.

One woman noticed that her mom had a black eye. Staff seemed to indicate that the woman had fallen. Her daughter didn’t know that her mom had fallen more than 40 times.

Those are just some of the allegations against Canyon Creek long-term care facility in Billings in a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of three former Canyon Creek residents’ families, who allege that the corporate owners, Koelsch Senior Communities, and Canyon Creek failed to care for the residents, instead wringing profits out of the business, while leaving seniors who lived there to fend for themselves.

Attorney Elizabeth Hausbeck of Hall, Booth and Smith in Missoula said Koelsch does not comment on pending litigation, and declined comment for this story.

In court documents, attorneys for Canyon Creek and Koelsch have denied the allegations, saying that many of the concerns raised in the lawsuit were a function of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, not the quality of care or staff.

In that respect, Koelsch Senior Communities joins a long and growing list of care facilities that claim that either state or federal exemptions created during the pandemic shield them from liability for patient care during COVID-19. KFF Health News reports that more than 1,100 lawsuits have been filed nationwide, challenging whether the nursing home and rehabilitation centers can be sued. In very broad terms, courts have made a distinction between the pandemic and those who died because of negligence or poor care.

Depositions and court filings in the Canyon Creek case paint a more detailed picture of what was happening inside the senior care center, which was hit by a round of COVID-19 deaths as the pandemic began to increase in intensity. At the time, staff from Billings Clinic and the National Guard were dispatched to Canyon Creek to help with pandemic, and Koelsch said that staff members from other company-owned properties were brought in from Arizona, Texas, Illinois and Washington.

Problems from food service to incorrect charting by nurses to being short-staffed hampered the facility.

However, documents filed by attorneys John Heenan and Philip McGrady claim that short staffing at Canyon Creek had been documented by the State of Montana prior to the pandemic, and that a family in January 2020, had complained about a resident death because of improper feeding, hydration and toileting issues.

Those stories are consistent with excerpts of a deposition taken as part of the case in which the daughter of Simons describes a pressure sore on her mother:

“The pressure sore was as big as my fist, and it was black, and it smelled, and it was in her lower back area…We were giving her morphine for the pain. They told us to do that. We’d have to clean her. And it was, it was awful, it was bad. You could see, you could see almost — you could see like the bone. It was really bad.”

The suit then alleges that instead of working to solve the care problems or increase the staffing, managers at Canyon Creek and its corporate offices in Olympia, Washington, pocketed COVID funds and sucked money away from Billings.

The court records indicate that Koelsch received $879,500 in COVID relief funds — of that, $366,000 went to Canyon Creek, and the rest appears to have gone to the corporate operations. The documents claim that Canyon Creek took excessive management fees, which were used to enrich a corporate office led largely by people associated with the Koelsch family, while not staffing properly enough to care for residents, as they were promised.

The COVID situation at Canyon Creek grew so dire that on July 14,  2020, CNN reported eight residents of Canyon Creek had died from COVID-19 and more than 50 became ill during that time. News reports revealed that the facility was offered free COVID testing via the State of Montana, but the organization’s leaders turned it down.

Court documents now allege that residents there had tested positive for COVID on June 30, the day that one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Elizabeth Guilford, was admitted. Court documents say that the family specifically asked whether the facility was COVID free, but it was later discovered via deposition that the nurse who had admitted Guilford had COVID, a fever and was not feeling well. Nevertheless, the nurse told attorneys she was still required to come to work.

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