A Cabarrus County woman alleges in a lawsuit that chronic understaffing and negligence at The Laurels of Salisbury nursing home caused the loss of her left leg.

Johnsie Overcash filed the lawsuit in Cabarrus County Superior Court. The action charges The Laurels with fraud, negligence and breach of contract and asks for unspecified punitive damages.

The lawsuit also alleges that The Laurels, a for-profit company, is purposely understaffed to increase profits.

Laura Fitzpatrick, administrator at the nursing home at 215 Lash Drive, declined to comment.

Overcash could not be reached for comment. Her attorney did not return telephone calls.

According to the lawsuit, Overcash fell at home and fractured her knee in March 2000. After treatment at NorthEast Medical Center in Concord, she entered The Laurels for rehabilitation.

During her stay there, the lawsuit says, the nursing home was constantly understaffed. The staff there admitted to patients and family members they could not perform all their duties in a timely manner due to the personnel shortage.

Overcash’s action says she is diabetic, and that her medicine was changed frequently, while her blood pressure was taken irregularly. A bandage on her leg went unchanged, the suit says, because a nurse was busy at other tasks. And the lawsuit says food carts sat in the hallway hours after lunchtime waiting to be delivered to patients.

The lawsuit says it was common for Overcash to be helped to the restroom by a staff member, then left there calling for help to return to her bed for up to 30 minutes because of short staffing.

On one of those occasions, after waiting more than 30 minutes for a staff member to return to the restroom for her, Overcash used a walker supplied by the nursing home to try to make it back to bed on her own, the suit says.

She fell and, when staff members helped her to bed, she told them she had increased pain in her injured knee and severe ankle pain, the lawsuit says.

“... the staff just looked at her ankle and stated that it ‘looked funny’ but it ‘must just be where the sock was,’ ” the lawsuit says.

That was March 30, 2000. Early the next morning, about 4:45 a.m., according to the lawsuit, the staff notified Overcash’s family of the fall when she still couldn’t bear weight on her ankle.

At NorthEast Medical Center, she was diagnosed with a recurrent fracture in her knee and a fractured ankle, with infection and blood oozing from a small puncture wound on the back of her knee, the suit says.

After surgery on April 2, Overcash returned to The Laurels for physical therapy, the action says. Over the next month, staff members noted a buildup of dead tissue and drainage from a surgical incision on her ankle.

On May 9, a doctor ordered Overcash sent back to NorthEast for treatment, then back to The Laurels, the lawsuit says. Her wound worse, Overcash returned to NorthEast May 25, where surgeons amputated her left leg at the ankle. On June 1, the leg was amputated below the knee, the suit says.

Overcash went back to The Laurels, but became lethargic and was taken to Rowan Regional Medical Center by ambulance July 18, 2000, the lawsuit says. After rehabilitating at another nursing home, she was discharged to her daughter’s care.

Overcash’s lawsuit accuses The Laurels of not only failing to meet the standard of care promised, but also of violating state and federal laws banning deceptive practices in claiming the nursing home could care for her.

State records show that the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services has received 12 separate complaints against the Laurels since the beginning of 2000, with most complaints containing more than one allegation.

Of the 42 allegations against the nursing home, the state found 11 substantiated. Among those, the state found The Laurels failed to:ensure a resident was administered correct medication; protect a resident from an accident; transfer a resident using the correct technique.

State officials won’t say which, if any, complaints were lodged by Overcash or her family.

Nursing homes usually are given an opportunity to correct substantiated findings resulting from complaints and annual inspections.

Inspectors performing an annual evaluation in 2000 found the nursing home “deficient”in three categories: providing services that meet a professional standard of quality; ensuring residents receive treatment and services to continue to be able to care for themselves; and immediately giving notification of a resident’s injury or a change in physical or mental health or treatment.

The first two deficiencies caused minimal harm or presented the potential for actual harm, affected few residents and were corrected in January 2001, according to federal Medicare records. The latter deficiency posed the potential for minimal harm, the records show.

Contact Scott Jenkins at 704-797-4248 or sjenkins@salisburypost.com .