Extended Care Hospital of Westminster: Consent Failures - CA
That finding came out of a November 5 complaint inspection, when a federal surveyor sat down with a licensed vocational nurse identified in inspection records as LVN 4. The nurse was direct about what had happened. The facility, LVN 4 said, had never obtained informed consent for the bed exit alarms. Not for the residents currently using them. Not historically.
The director of nursing confirmed it.
During an interview and concurrent medical record review conducted the same morning, the director of nursing reviewed the records for three residents, identified in the inspection report as Residents 1, 2, and 3. All three had bed exit alarms in place. None of them had signed consent forms. Neither had any responsible party acting on their behalf.
The director of nursing did not dispute the finding. The facility, the director said, had never obtained informed consent for the use of the bed exit alarms.
Bed exit alarms are devices placed on or near a resident's bed that sound when the resident attempts to get up or leave. They are common in nursing facilities, often used with residents considered at risk of falling. They are also a form of monitoring, and in some cases a form of restraint, applied directly to a person's body and immediate environment. Whether a resident wants one, whether they understand what it does, whether they have agreed to have it used on them, those are not incidental questions.
The inspection report classified the violation under F0552, which covers residents' rights to be informed and to make decisions about their own care, including the right to consent to or refuse treatment. The level of harm was listed as minimal harm or potential for actual harm. The number of residents affected was listed as few.
That classification reflects the regulatory floor, not a full accounting of what it means to have a device installed on your bed, in a facility where you may already have limited mobility or cognitive capacity, without anyone explaining what it is or asking whether you agree to it.
The inspection was triggered by a complaint, not a routine survey. Someone raised a concern, and when investigators arrived, they found that the practice the complaint described was not an isolated incident or a paperwork gap on a single resident's chart. It was facility-wide. LVN 4 said the facility had never done it. The director of nursing said the same thing.
Extended Care Hospital of Westminster is a long-term acute care hospital in Orange County. The residents named in the report, identified only by number, had alarms installed on their beds as of the date of the inspection. The report does not describe when the alarms were placed, how long each resident had been using one without consent, or whether any of the three residents had ever been told what the device was for.
What the report does establish is that the absence of consent was not an oversight on any individual nurse's part. Two separate staff members, one a floor nurse and one the facility's director of nursing, both described the same practice in the same terms. The facility had never obtained informed consent for bed exit alarms. That is a description of a policy, not a mistake.
For Residents 1, 2, and 3, that means an unknown number of nights with a device attached to their beds, set to alert staff if they moved toward the edge, without their knowledge or agreement that this was how they would be monitored.
Full Inspection Report
The details above represent a summary of key findings. View the complete inspection report for Extended Care Hospital of Westminster from 2025-11-05 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 5, 2026 · Our methodology
EXTENDED CARE HOSPITAL OF WESTMINSTER in WESTMINSTER, CA was cited for violations during a health inspection on November 5, 2025.
The nurse was direct about what had happened.
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.