Maine’s Health Department Rarely Investigates When Residents Wander Away From Their Care Facilities

Elopement — when a resident wanders out of a care home — is a real risk, particularly for people with dementia. But in the vast majority of cases in the state, the facilities are never inspected and rarely sanctioned.

by Rose Lundy, The Maine Monitor
May 28, 5 a.m. EDT
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Co-published with The Maine Monitor
Series:Long-Term Challenge: Maine’s Lax Oversight of Residential Care Facilities
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Maine Monitor. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Late one morning in May 2021, a resident of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, spotted an “elderly, disoriented” man standing in a driveway, according to a police report. The resident called police and then followed the man on foot as he wandered to a nearby intersection.

When police officers arrived, the man had difficulty communicating with them. But he was clutching a toiletry case that contained a card for Cape Memory Care, the residential care facility where he lived. When the officers brought him back, the facility’s staff said they didn’t know that he had been missing. The officers reported the incident to the Maine Department of Health and Human Services for “inadequate care and supervision of a patient.”

The health department opened an investigation but only conducted a “desk review” — looking into the incident without visiting the facility. Three weeks later, it closed the case without citing Cape Memory Care for failing to prevent the man from wandering away.

The health department’s minimal response to the incident illustrates what happens when residents wander away from their residential care facilities in Maine: In the vast majority of cases, investigators never inspect the facilities, conducting only a desk review or no investigation at all, and rarely impose sanctions.

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