A new civil suit that could grow to include more than 80 employees accuses managers at a state-run veterans home of showing “deliberate indifference” toward the health and safety of the workers during one of the nation’s worst COVID-19 outbreaks.
The legal action is being closely watched by wary providers — and potentially by an unknown number of disgruntled nursing home employees — around the country.
The class action, filed in US District Court in Massachusetts on Thursday, accuses a former Holyoke Soldiers’ Home superintendent, former medical director, former chief nursing officer, former infectious disease nurse and former assistant director of nursing of violating workers’ civil rights while trying to conceal how bad the outbreak had become.
Some 77 veterans died, with many of the deaths attributed by later investigations to the mingling of exposed and non-exposed patients. The lawsuit also alleges that more than 80 employees were sickened.
The state has already settled a civil suit brought by residents and families to the tune of $58 million, and the state is attempting to reinstate criminal charges it previously brought against some of the facility’s former leaders.
The latest salvo comes from Debra Ragoonanan, who is still an employee at the facility, which was renamed the Massachusetts Veterans’ Home in Holyoke on March 1. She and her attorneys argue in a 207-page filing that those leaders made a “series of criminally catastrophic decisions in their mishandling of the COVID19 virus within the Soldier’s Home.”
“The Soldiers’ Home Defendants engaged in a knowing pattern of lies and misrepresentations in a shocking attempt to cover up their own malfeasance,” the suit claims. “If the employees had been informed of what the Soldiers Home Defendants knew, such as there being sufficient PPE within the facility and the identity of who and who was infected with COVID-19, they could have taken measures to mitigate the risk. Instead, the Soldiers’ Home Defendants deceived their employees about the risks of coronavirus and forced employees to continue working even as they exhibited symptoms of COVID and as they waited for the results of COVID tests — and even after they had tested positive.”
Ragoonanan’s attorney is seeking damages for the class “at the greatest extent available under the law.” He asked the judge to certify a class of workers who were employed at the Soldiers’ Home during the COVID-19 outbreak from Feb. 1 through and April 1, 2020 and suffered harm. He has asked for a jury trial.
Lawyers for the defendants were not listed in court documents reviewed by McKnight’s Long-Term Care News this week. An attorney who has represented former superintendent Bennett Walsh in past cases had not responded to a request for comment by publication deadline.
A previous class-action suit representing former residents and their families ended in a $58 million settlement late last year.
But another class-action lawsuit from employees was dismissed by a judge when the court ruled the workers hadn’t shown how their constitutional rights were violated. It was unclear Tuesday how this latest case might differ.
The case claims employees were deprived access to personal protective equipment and that guidance that was beginning to become clear and recommended by outside agencies was not followed at the facility. Ragoonanan has spoken to local media about the emotional distress of seeing so many residents die, saying that some workers developed post-traumatic stress disorder in addition to long COVID symptoms.
