Mary Regina’s nursing home is a substantive 380-page journalistic novel assembled over 5 years of research by a retired former journalist and certified internal auditor, William J. Beerman, Sr. The author wants to share what he learned.

After Mary Regina’s death, William filed suit over the mistreatment his mother suffered, and he eventually began looking into how the government oversees nursing homes. What he found out was alarming.

This book presents in an easy-to-read, memoir-like framework, a three-part narrative: (1) the human-interest background story of Mary Regina and William, (2) details of Mary Regina’s hospital and nursing home experiences, and (3) what William learned about government oversight of nursing homes.

William reports on state attorney general (AG) lawsuits and AG research that encompass 65 nursing homes and more than 1 million patient-days of nursing home care. The investigations for the AG lawsuits elicited reports on nursing home operations from former employees who became confidential witnesses for the AGs. The investigations looked not only at how residents were treated but at how the nursing homes interacted with oversight agencies and with their parent corporations. Audits of oversight agencies by state and federal auditors, and the work of a nursing home quality improvement task force are also covered.

William grew up in a dysfunctional family, as many of us do. He had a strained relationship with his mother, largely because of a 13-year-long, scorched-earth divorce war that she waged against his father, who was a steelworker. William’s parents were children of the Great Depression, his father was a member of the Greatest Generation, and William is a Baby Boomer.

As Mary Regina grew older, she lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and William lived 1,775 miles away in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

When William’s sister died young, he became his mother’s sole surviving offspring. And after Mary Regina broke her hip, William traveled to Pittsburgh and spent 20 days standing by at her bedside in a skilled nursing facility. He observed what happened on the day shifts at the nursing home and listened as Mary Regina told him what happened at night.

William believed the state department of health (DOH) did not investigate satisfactorily his well-documented complaints about Mary Regina’s nursing home. As a former auditor, he believed that the methodology that the DOH used to investigate complaints about nursing homes was doomed to fail. The year-to-year statistics on DOH oversight performance verified this, in William’s opinion.

After resolving his lawsuit, William realized that he was just one of hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. who had filed complaints about nursing homes. He decided to broaden out his research from his own case study of his mother’s experience. He looked into how the state and federal oversight systems worked for others, and he found that what had happened in his mother’s case was not at all uncommon.

William was unprepared and utterly incompetent to deal with the problems his mother encountered after she broke her hip, yet he faced extreme deadline pressure as he struggled to make decisions. If a nursing home looms in the future for you or a loved one, you can become a smarter consumer by reading this book. In addition to detailing William’s experiences, the book includes a chapter on an advocacy organization that will assist current and prospective nursing home residents and their families in finding help: The National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care.