Four years have passed, and sources say that an assisted living facility has now called the cops 151 times.
Maggie Sutton saw a trend in the summer of 2022. She was a social worker and case manager for the Greenfield Fire Department.
It caught her attention that paramedics were often called to calls from The Villa of Greenfield, an assisted living center only a few minutes away.
Sutton talked about some scary things she knew had happened.
At one scene, rescuers found a person who had been lying on the ground for 12 hours, drenched in urine and feces.
In a different case, rescuers had to break a window to get into the building while the staff was asleep.
Some of the 911 calls were from residents who needed help getting out of bed, but Sutton also saw that many of the calls were from residents who were just feeling alone and needed help.
Sutton became suspicious when the assisted living facility called for help in an emergency a lot of the time. This made him think that there might be problems with the care and control given to the residents.
It’s Sutton’s job to help people who use emergency services a lot.
Often, that includes people who live in assisted living facilities, which are having a hard time across the state with staffing, funds, and the rising medical needs of their residents.
As the summer went on, Sutton didn’t see any signs that things were getting better inside the mostly Medicaid-funded center.
At the same time, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that area first responders were getting too busy.
She told them, “I have to start giving these reports to the state.”
In July and September, Sutton sent three reports to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.
But she wasn’t the only one who had a problem with the building. In 2022, the state got seven more complaints, after dealing with 18 since 2019.
The state was done with its study by October 2022.
It had 97 pages.
In the summer of 2022, Sutton often got to work before 8 a.m. to find firemen at her office door with news about the most recent overnight stay at The Villa of Greenfield.
“In a way, they wanted me to see it for myself,” Sutton, who used to be a certified nurse aide (CNA), said.
Sutton said that the 42-bed building hit her in every way as soon as she walked in.
She smelled weed, feces, and urine, saw people in wheelchairs slouched over, and heard others calling for help without stopping.
Records show that cops called the building 151 times between 2019 and 2022.
Most of the time, paramedics were helpful.
A recent Journal Sentinel study found that Wisconsin’s assisted living system has doubled in size over the past 20 years, but it has had trouble keeping up with the rising number of health problems among residents.