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Sandberg Phoenix & von Gontard’s Long Term Care Team is tracking certain bills passing through the Missouri legislature. One of those bills that could greatly impact our clients is HB 2107 outlined below.
Currently five states – Illinois, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and Washington have laws requiring long term facilities to allow residents to request monitoring devices in resident rooms. Utah currently has legislation under consideration to allow monitoring, but the Utah legislation restricts the use of such devices to assisted living communities. Now, Missouri is looking at implementing legislation to add Missouri to the ranks of states allowing electronic monitoring in nursing homes.
Rep. Elaine Nekritz (D-Buffalo Grove) Introduced HB 3300 to the Illinois General Assembly on February 26, 2015, amending the Nursing Home Care Act by removing the provision permitting the award of costs and attorney’s fees. Under the current statute, 210 ILCS 45/3-602, facility residents who prevail on a claim asserting a violation of their rights are entitled to recover costs and attorney’s fees, in addition to actual damages. Under HB 300, facility residents would only be permitted to recover actual damages.
Missouri state Representative, Andrew McDaniel, R-Deering, recently introduced House Bill No. 843 to the Missouri General Assembly which would allow monitoring devices in nursing homes across the state. “Monitoring device” is defined as “a surveillance instrument that broadcasts or records activity, but does not include a still camera.” Representative McDaniel stated that the reason for his proposal is that he “had a constituent call me and talk about different things about people with bedsores, not rolled over right, and stuff like that.”
Less than a month before leaving office, former Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed legislation reducing the number of jurors in civil cases from 12 to six. The legislation also requires counties to pay the jurors $25 for their first day of jury service and $50 every day for the remainder of their service. This legislation is effective starting June 1, 2015.