Plaintiff’s lawyer: facility “chronically short-staffed”

An attorney for the plaintiff says an elderly Walhalla woman died in the hospital after being a patient in a nearby privately-run nursing and rehabilitation facility. Attorney Kenneth Connor, in an opening statement to the jury today, blamed the Seneca Health and Rehabilitation Center for being short-staffed and for increasing profitability by cutting labor costs. The plaintiff’s attorney outlined evidence that its side will present in what’s expected to be a civil trial to last weeks at the Oconee Courthouse. The trial’s first witnesses are expected to take the stand today. The plaintiff’s counterpart, however, attorney Lori Proctor, on behalf of the defendant, denied any in-appropriate care given to Dorothy Reynolds, who died in January 2011—about eight months after undergoing breast cancer surgery.