Highland Care Center of Redlands: Theft Safeguards Failed - CA
That finding sits at the center of a federal complaint inspection completed at Highland Care Center of Redlands in September 2025. Inspectors cited the facility under F0607, a federal tag covering a nursing home's obligation to protect residents from misappropriation of property. The level of harm was classified as minimal harm or potential for actual harm, and inspectors noted that a few residents were affected.
The citation is narrow in scope. But what it describes is a specific kind of institutional failure, one that is harder to explain away than a gap in resources or a shortage of staff. The facility had built a system. Someone, or more than one person, chose not to use it.
Highland Care Center's Director of Nursing laid out for inspectors exactly what protections the facility had assembled. Residents had access to locked safes for their valuables. The facility maintained inventory tracking for personal belongings. When residents withdrew cash, staff were supposed to obtain signed acknowledgements. And employees received education and enforcement training on abuse, neglect, and misappropriation of resident property.
Then the Director of Nursing said something that inspectors recorded almost without elaboration: facility staff did not follow policy for this matter.
That sentence is the inspection report. There is no ambiguity in it, no bureaucratic hedging. The person responsible for nursing operations at Highland Care Center told federal inspectors, plainly, that the safeguards designed to protect vulnerable residents from having their money or belongings taken were not being used.
The job description for certified nurse assistants at the facility includes, under essential duties and responsibilities, a line about abiding by all facility policies and procedures, including not disclosing user ID codes and passwords. That detail suggests the breakdown extended to basic information security practices, not just the physical handling of valuables.
Nursing home residents occupy a position of unusual financial vulnerability. Many have cognitive impairments that make it difficult to track their own belongings or remember transactions. Others rely entirely on staff to manage their money, retrieve items from storage, or document what they own. When a facility builds systems to protect against misappropriation, those systems exist precisely because the alternative, relying on individual staff judgment and honesty without any accountability structure, has proven inadequate in facilities across the country.
Signed acknowledgements for cash withdrawals exist because cash disappears without them. Locked safes exist because unsecured valuables in shared spaces, accessed by rotating staff and visitors, do not stay put. Inventory tracking exists because a resident who cannot remember what they brought with them on admission cannot report what went missing.
When those systems go unused, residents are left with no record of what happened to their money or their things.
The Director of Nursing's acknowledgment that staff did not follow policy does not appear, in the inspection report, to have been accompanied by any explanation of how long the lapse had been occurring, how many residents were affected beyond the few noted in the citation, or what specific incident or pattern of incidents triggered the complaint that led to the inspection. Complaint inspections at nursing homes are typically initiated by a report from a resident, family member, or staff member. Someone contacted regulators. The inspection report does not say who, or what they described.
What the report does say is that the facility's own infrastructure for protecting residents was functional and documented. The certified nurse assistant job description made compliance with facility policies an explicit professional obligation. The Director of Nursing was familiar enough with those safeguards to recite them to inspectors in detail. This was not a facility operating without a plan. It was a facility whose plan was not being executed.
That distinction matters in how nursing home oversight works. A facility that lacks policies can be directed to create them. A facility that has policies and does not enforce them raises different questions, about supervision, about accountability, about whether training on abuse and misappropriation was treated as a compliance exercise or as something the facility actually meant.
The Director of Nursing confirmed that staff education and enforcement on abuse, neglect, and misappropriation was among the safeguards in place. Enforcement is the operative word. Education without enforcement is a poster on a wall. The inspection finding suggests that whatever enforcement mechanisms existed were not sufficient to ensure that staff were actually following the procedures they had been trained on.
Residents at Highland Care Center, like residents at nursing facilities throughout California, cannot easily protect themselves. They cannot stand watch over their own belongings. Many cannot audit their own finances. They signed over a measure of control over their daily lives when they entered the facility, and in exchange, they are entitled to expect that the people responsible for their care will not take from them, and will not create conditions that make it easy for others to take from them.
The locked safes were available. The cash acknowledgement forms existed. The inventory system was in place.
For the residents affected by this inspection, the question that remains unanswered in the public record is simpler than any regulatory framework: where did their things go, and will they ever get them back.
Full Inspection Report
The details above represent a summary of key findings. View the complete inspection report for Highland Care Center of Redlands from 2025-09-26 including all violations, facility responses, and corrective action plans.
Additional Resources
Data source: This article is based on inspection data downloaded directly from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) via Medicare.gov. CMS releases inspection reports in bulk; we publish the findings as documented by state surveyors in the official Form CMS-2567 Statement of Deficiencies.
Plan of correction: The CMS report we receive does not include the facility's plan of correction. Facilities submit plans of correction separately to state survey agencies and those responses may not be reflected in CMS data at the time of publication. The absence of a plan of correction in our data does not mean one was not filed. Readers who want information about corrective steps taken are encouraged to contact the facility directly or their state survey agency.
Corrections may have occurred: Inspection reports reflect conditions observed on the date of the survey. Facilities may have implemented corrections, staffing changes, additional training, or other remediation since the report was issued. We report what CMS provides and encourage readers to seek current information from the facility.
Editorial process: Inspection findings are extracted from CMS source documents and synthesized using AI, reviewed for factual accuracy against the original report by our editorial team.
Professional review: All content reviewed by Christopher F. Nesbitt, Sr., NH EMT & BU-trained Paralegal.
Last verified: September 13, 2026 · Our methodology
Highland Care Center of Redlands in Redlands, CA was cited for violations during a health inspection on September 26, 2025.
That finding sits at the center of a federal complaint inspection completed at Highland Care Center of Redlands in September 2025.
Health inspections identify deficiencies that facilities must correct. Violations range from minor documentation issues to serious safety concerns. Review the full report below for specific details and facility response.