Lee Rood

lrood@dmreg.com

A quest by a Des Moines hospital to find a nursing home in Iowa willing to take a stroke victim who also happened to be transgender and bipolar took four and a half months.

After a wide search and several evaluations, LeQuan Edwards, 52, landed at the Norwalk Rehabilitation Center, where staffers have been trained to work with transgender people.

The inability of Mercy Hospital Medical Center staff to discharge Edwards cost the hospital significantly and prohibited it from admitting other patients needing medical care.

Only two of the 137 days Edwards spent waiting were covered by Medicaid, according to hospital spokesman Gregg Lagan. The average daily rate only for food and nursing care was more than $1,000, meaning the baseline cost for the 135 remaining days was about $142,000.

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Hospital leaders across Iowa have been saying Iowa’s bottleneck of patients who cannot be released for lack of a place to go is worsening, and they’ve blamed it on a lack of options for mentally ill patients who need supervision short of full hospitalization.

Lagan says Mercy has four other patients right now — who have had dementia, schizophrenia, a head injury and stroke — who cannot be discharged since no facility will take them because of complex diagnoses.

“One person was admitted in October 2015,” he said. “They’re not being discharged because there is nowhere to discharge them to.”

But Edwards' case is also complex because she is transgender, and has bipolar and post-traumatic stress disorders.

A retired United Methodist minister contacted the Reader’s Watchdog in May after all but one of 90 nursing homes and rehab centers declined to admit Edwards, who is biologically male but identifies as a woman.

The one facility that would accept her was in Muscatine, two and a half hours from her family and only support system.

Edwards said back in May that she had been depressed and even homeless in her life. But the refusal of any facilities in central Iowa to take her made her feel hopeless.

“I am being treated like a leper,” she said. “No one deserves to be treated like this.”

Nursing homes and rehabilitation facilities that accept Medicaid are prohibited by law from discriminating against residents based on gender identity. Iowa’s Civil Rights Act also expressly prohibits discrimination based on gender identity.

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But Brian Carter, the retired minister and longtime friend of the Edwards family, said a hospital social worker told him Edwards' transgender status was a significant reason they couldn’t find a nursing or rehabilitation facility near Des Moines.

Facilities that were accepting new residents said men didn’t want to room with a person who is biologically male but identifies as a woman. Neither did female residents, Carter said.

The mid-May Watchdog column spurred concern from those who oppose having transgender people in shared rooms and others who deplored Edwards' rejection based on gender identity.

Donna Red Wing, executive director of One Iowa, the statewide advocacy group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, said the problem of finding homes for elderly transgender people is a national one.

It’s unclear how long Edwards will stay in Norwalk. Before moving to the facility on July 27, she told the Des Moines Register she was severely depressed.

A director at the facility said she was not yet ready to be interviewed after living there only a week.

Lee Rood's Reader's Watchdog column helps Iowans get answers and accountability from public officials, the justice system, businesses and nonprofits. Contact her at lrood@dmreg.com, 515-284-8549 on Twitter @leerood or at Facebook.com/readerswatchdog.