Lawmakers: Go ahead, move the bed

A new law lets nursing home residents arrange their bedroom furniture as they see fit.

By STEPHEN NOHLGREN
Published May 10, 2005

	[Times photo: Cherie Diez]
	Barbara Moore, left, and roommate Ann Wilson now have the legal right to create a more homey atmosphere in their room at Westminster Suncoast Health Center in St. Petersburg. The law formerly forbade them from pushing beds against the walls, breaking up their space.

ST. PETERSBURG - For four years, Barbara Moore, 85, and Ann Wilson, 90, have shared a blue-carpeted room at Westminster Suncoast Health Center.

Each has her own easy chair, dresser and nightstand. With Moore's bed pushed against the north wall and Wilson's against the south, there's enough room in between to host a small card party.

Now, thanks to the Florida Legislature, the two women are no longer scofflaws.

On their last day of business Friday, lawmakers passed a measure giving nursing home residents the right to arrange their furniture as they see fit - which wasn't the case before.

Florida's decades-old safety code has required that nursing home beds stick out perpendicularly from the wall, leaving space on both sides. That configuration mimics hospital rooms, where doctors, nurses and aides need quick access to patients from both sides of the bed.

But for years, nursing home residents and their families quietly pushed beds against walls to create more space for furniture from home, or for cruising around in a wheelchair or walker. For years, state regulators looked the other way.

That unspoken truce was broken last year when a few nursing home administrators asked for official exemption from the rules. Instead, with the issue out in the open, regulators cracked down, sanctioning homes during annual inspection surveys when they found residents with beds against the wall.

The resulting uproar reached legislative ears. The law passed Friday allows wall beds as long as residents request them, their roommates don't object and they don't interfere with safety or care. For example, residents on ventilators might need space on both sides of the bed because of the tubes and wires.

It's just common sense, said Rep. John Stargel, R-Lakeland, who sponsored the legislation in the House.

"Look at every citizen's room. Unless you have a huge room, you don't put the bed in the middle of the room," Stargel said. "In tight quarters, this layout (beds against walls) gives them a little bit better quality of life."

The House and Senate both unanimously passed the bill and sent it to Gov. Jeb Bush for his signature.

"My residents are ecstatic," said Martin Goetz, administrator of Jacksonville's River Garden Hebrew Home for the Aged, where almost all the residents have their beds against the wall. "We had the ombudsman here. We had petitions signed by the residents. They were not going to move those beds."

Barbara Moore's daughter, Barbara Hartwell, began writing regulators and legislators in January after reading in the St. Petersburg Times about the bed crackdown.

She and her family had wallpapered her mother's room, put in carpet and furniture, along with her mother's prized family photographs. Putting two beds into the middle of the room would have ruined the homey effect, she said.

Westminster's annual survey occurred in May of last year, before the crackdown, so Hartwell figured she had a year to wake up legislators.

"It was a stupid regulation buried in there," Hartwell said Friday. "Nursing homes are not like hospitals. If people were sick enough to be in a hospital, they'd be in one. This is their home."

Her mother, who suffered an aneurysm years ago, said her room feels as spacious as her grandfather's cow barn. "Everybody feels so good in here."

Ann Wilson, the roommate, is glad she won't have to move around her brown upholstered rocking chair, a long-ago gift from her late husband, Earnest.

"I intend to pass away in this rocker," she said.

[Last modified May 10, 2005, 01:03:07]