Nursing homes in Ohio are abandoning some of their most vulnerable residents — elderly people with dementia, diabetes, and mobility impairments — at homeless shelters, sometimes without warning, medications, or any plan for their care. Federal inspectors have cited at least seven Ohio facilities for this practice in recent years, and advocates say it's becoming more common.

This isn't just cruel. It's illegal.

Federal law requires nursing homes to give residents at least 30 days' notice before an involuntary discharge. It requires facilities to ensure that discharges are safe and appropriate. At least one patient — a man who had lived in his nursing home for 22 years — was secretly taken to an emergency shelter after his insurance lapsed, without any notice and without the documents, medication supplies, or care plan he needed to survive on his own.

Homeless shelters are not equipped to care for people managing 10 to 20 medications a day, or who rely on walkers and wheelchairs, or who can't climb to a top bunk. When these patients show up, shelters are forced to call emergency services within days because they simply cannot meet their needs. In one case, a woman with dementia, a broken leg, and diabetes was left outside a Columbus shelter in late-summer heat. She was never located by the time the federal inspection report was published.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which funds most nursing home care in the United States, has the authority to enforce the rules that exist — and to hold facilities and their corporate owners accountable when they don't follow them. We are calling on CMS and Ohio state regulators to investigate all facilities cited for unsafe discharges, impose meaningful penalties on those found in violation, and require that every nursing home resident receive a safe, legal, and dignified discharge process.

No one should be abandoned at a shelter after decades of depending on a facility for their survival. Sign this petition to demand enforcement of the protections that nursing home residents are already owed under the law.