02:37 PM EST on Monday, March 14, 2005

BY PAUL EDWARD PARKER
Journal Staff Writer

After Russell J. Bowden was taken to a hospital from his Woonsocket nursing home suffering from dehydration, his wife, Janet M. Bowden, filed a telephone complaint against the home.

Journal photo / Steve Szydlowski

The Health Department never gave Janet M. Bowden the records for which she asked. Instead, she received them from The Journal.

When she asked the state Health Department for a written copy of her complaint, as well as the report on what the department had found, she was stunned.

A state official told her, "We don't do that."

Bowden suspected something fishy. "Right then, I was thinking cover up . . . because they wouldn't give me the information," she said. "I was ripping."

That same official had told her that her complaint had no basis, that there was no reason to believe the nursing home, Oakland Grove Health Care Center, had mistreated her husband.

But Bowden would not accept that. Her husband had been so disabled that he needed assistance drinking. If he became dehydrated, she knew, then workers at the nursing home were not doing their jobs.

Bowden, 67, of Cumberland, is convinced the Health Department was withholding the records hoping that she -- like others who had filed complaints against other nursing homes -- would just go away.

"The Health Department was stopping it right there," said Bowden. "This is how they shut them up, they intimidate them."

She added: "I didn't know where to go to get help."

TODAY MARKS the beginning of Sunshine Week: Your Right to Know, a nationwide observance by newspapers and other media outlets designed to draw attention to "why open government is important to everyone, not just journalists," according to the sunshineweek.org Web site. The initiative is organized by the American Society o' Newspaper Editors and the Radio-Television News Directors Association.

In the last year, principles of open government -- particularly access to public records -- have been important for the Ocean State's roughly 9,000 nursing home residents.

It began with financial problems at Hillside Health Center, a nursing home on Providence's East Side.

Providence Journal reporter Jennifer Levitz wanted to get copies of recent inspection reports for Hillside and other nursing homes owned by the same operator. The reports are supposed to be public records.

But Levitz found they are not readily available to someone who just walks into the Health Department's facilities regulation office.

Unlike Janet Bowden, though, Levitz knew what to do when rebuffed while trying to get public records. Levitz and the Journal filed a request under the state's Access to Public Records Act. The state law requires that most documents kept by public agencies be made available to the public, either for viewing at the agency's office or copying. The law makes some exceptions, such as records containing personal medical information.

The Health Department charged The Journal $150 for the inspection reports. The law allows agencies to charge reasonable fees for copying records.

When Levitz got the inspection reports, the story changed. No longer was it just about one nursing home with money troubles. It became a story about whether the Health Department was doing its job protecting nursing home patients by enforcing safety regulations.

On Aug. 22, The Journal ran a Page One story by Levitz headlined "Resident #1." Levitz chronicled how Health Department inspectors watched, over a 16-week period, as one Hillside resident deteriorated.

When inspectors first saw Germaine Morsilli, she was lying in urine and her left buttock had a bedsore. Bedsores, skin worn away by the constant pressure of someone who cannot move, can be wounds of neglect.

Hillside kept promising to take care of Morsilli. The Health Department kept giving the home more time, even when one of Morsilli's sores had worsened to a bloody crater and an inspector had decided she was in immediate jeopardy of being gravely hurt or of dying.

The public records Levitz got revealed a system in which regulators were reluctant to close poorly performing nursing homes; a system in which fines were frequently threatened, then forgiven, a system in which regulators were afraid of angering nursing home operators.

In wake of that story and others, change has begun in the nursing home industry. Governor Carcieri ordered an internal review of the Health Department's oversight of nursing homes. The General Assembly is considering legislation that would toughen the inspection process and make the results available to the families of nursing home residents and to the public.

Without the access to the Health Department records provided by state law, "Resident #1" would probably never have been written.

"The inspection reports -- that was the key to the whole story," said Levitz.

ALTHOUGH Janet Bowden did not know where to turn for help, she did not give up. She contacted politicians, including Rep. Patrick Kennedy and Lt. Gov. Charles Fogarty. Under the pressure Bowden instigated, the Health Department last June reopened its investigation into her complaint.

This time, the department found that Oakland Grove had failed Russell Bowden by, among other things, not making sure he was drinking enough.

But the department still did not give Bowden a copy of its inspection report. She received a copy in September, from The Journal, which was looking into unrelated allegations at Oakland Grove.

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Digital extra:

More on Sunshine Week and open government organizations and essays written by URI journalism students on press freedom.:

http://www.projo.com/extra/2005/sunshineweek/