Nursing Home

Harkins Builders Inc. of Silver Spring has started construction of the Jenkins Memorial Nursing Home, a $6.5 million, 156-bed facility that is being added to the Jenkins Memorial campus at 1000 S. Caton Ave.Containing an Alzheimer wing, an adult day-care area for 45 people, a chapel and a convent, the three-story, 83,540-square-foot building will replace an existing 126-bed nursing home on the campus.The existing nursing home will be converted to a 90-unit apartment complex for the elderly.

State health officials slapped an immediate ban on admissions to a West Baltimore nursing home yesterday, citing a pattern of medication errors along with a curious incident in which nurses wrote on a medical chart that they cared for a patient who in fact wasn't there.After issuing the ban on Poplar Manor Nursing Home, Deputy Health Secretary Nelson J. Sabatini said he questioned whether the home's medical director, Dr. Mark Davis -- who also has an ownership stake in the home and cares for all 157 patients there -- could possibly deliver a decent quality of care while assuming so many roles.

Helen Bish waits for her ride by the door of her daughter's Pasadenahome every morning. The small van takes her to Almost Family, an adult day care center in Arnold."

Michael Paul Griffith, accused of suffocating a 94-year-old nursing home patient in 1993, is expected to enter a plea agreement today, according to courthouse sources.Details of the agreement -- reached last week during meetings with Carroll Circuit Judge Luke K. Burns Jr. -- were not available, but sources said that Mr. Griffith's jury trial on first-degree murder charges that was to have begun today has been canceled.Prosecutors charged Mr. Griffith, 32, of Westminster with first- and second-degree murder in June in the December 1993 death of Carrie Marie Ecker.

BOOK REVIEWTitle: "Old Friends"Author: Tracy KidderPublisher: Houghton MifflinLength, price: 384 pages, $22.95 To open Tracy Kidder's "Old Friends" is to enter a world many of us will know but few of us want to think about -- the world of the nursing home.Mr. Kidder, whose other works include the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Soul of a New Machine" and "Among Schoolchildren," immerses himself, and his readers, in the settings of his books.He spent two years with Joe Torchio and Lou Freed, roommates at Linda Manor, observing and chronicling their daily experience of life in the Massachusetts nursing home.

I WOULD never have believed just four months ago that I would find myself taken by ambulance from intensive care at Greater Baltimore Medical Center to a nursing home.I was placed in a pleasant sunny room with an adjoining bath. The first 10 days I was weak and had nursing care around the clock. After a week of not doing much beside feeding myself, I was growing stronger and hoped to return to my apartment. But my children and doctor said no, that I needed at least a daytime nurse and someone to make sure that I got my meals.

FREDERICK -- Charley Anders bounds into Jim Eby's room at the Citizens Nursing Home of Frederick County and finds Mr. Eby lying in bed, looking ashen and not a bit good.But within minutes Mr. Anders has his old friend Mr. Eby sitting up, laughing and telling stories about when he used to go trout fishing and catch more than his limit and drop the extras down his waders so the warden wouldn't notice.That's the magic of Mr. Anders. He's a whirlwind of goodwill who, at age 85, swirls into nursing homes and visits as many as 200 residents a day, almost always leaving them cheerier.

Six months after a judge's ruling forced her out of the nursing home business, Lois McGovern is hoping to rebuild her operation, now that a recent decision by the Maryland Court of Appeals has cleared the way.The ruling gives McGovern the right to operate a nursing home that she lost when a Baltimore County Circuit Court judge ruled last year that the "bed rights" to her 96-bed nursing home belonged to her landlord.The landlord, Joseph H. Loveman, died in March after selling the property that McGovern called Catonsville Nursing Home.

Four deer were shot and killed yesterday by a Queen Anne's County deputy sheriff after the animals -- apparently reacting to their own reflections -- crashed through two windows of a Centreville nursing home and ran amok in two offices."