Nursing home owner says fire-safety issue triggered evacuation

The Aspire of Donnellson nursing home. (Photo courtesy of Lee County Assessor's Office)

The owners of the Aspire of Donnellson nursing home say fire-safety issues resulted in the evacuation of the facility earlier this week.

State officials helped evacuate the building’s 16 residents in the midst of an inspection on Tuesday, although they have not specified the issue that triggered the move.

Krista Molnar Sikes of Beacon Health Management, the home’s Florida-based owner, said Friday the problem was with the electrical panel that controls the fire alarms and sprinklers.

“On Tuesday, Aug. 28, 2024, during a review of the systems it was discovered that the fire panel was not functioning as intended,” she said in a written statement. “Aspire of Donnellson staff worked closely with regulators and determined that while the repair was ongoing it was in the residents’ best interest to be relocated to neighboring facilities until the unit was working properly. The repair work will be completed shortly, and we will move our residents back to the facility when the appropriate regulators confirm it is safe to do so.”

Beacon operates nine Iowa nursing homes, all of which carry the Aspire name.

This is the second evacuation of the facility in recent years. On Christmas Eve in 2022, the home’s residents were evacuated with the assistance of the fire department and more than a dozen other agencies after a water line leading to the sprinkler system burst and flooded the building. The facility didn’t reopen until October 2023.

Almost immediately after the Donnellson home reopened in October 2023, it was the focus of complaints. In November of that year, inspectors from DIAL investigated seven complaints and substantiated six of them. The home was cited for 11 regulatory violations, although no fines or penalties were imposed.

In April 2024, inspectors from DIAL visited the Donnellson facility again, this time to investigate a backlog of 10 complaints. Nine of the 10 complaints were substantiated.

While there, the inspectors cited the home for 30 state and federal regulatory violations – an unusually high number — and proposed, but then held in suspension, $15,700 in fines.

The violations included failure to meet overall quality of care standards, failure to treat pressure sores, failure to have sufficient nursing staff, failure to avoid significant medication errors, failure to meet infection-control standards, failure to perform CPR on residents who had died, and numerous failures related to a lack of staff training.

Aspire of Donnellson has the lowest possible quality ratings on the federal government’s Care Compare website . It has been awarded one star, on a five-star scale, for both its inspection results and its staffing levels.

According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the home was last subjected to federal fines in 2022, when $30,544 in fines were imposed. It has been six years since any state fines were imposed, according to state records.