Waveny Care Center: Advance Directive Rights Failure - CT
The November inspection, triggered by a complaint, cited the facility for failing to honor residents' rights to request, refuse, or discontinue treatment, to decline participation in experimental research, and to formulate advance directives. It was one of seven deficiencies inspectors recorded during that visit.
The violation sits in a category that regulators classify as isolated, with no actual harm documented but potential for more than minimal harm. That framing can make it sound minor. It isn't.
Advance directives are the documents that determine what happens to a person when they can no longer speak for themselves. A do-not-resuscitate order. A living will. A healthcare proxy designation. These are the instruments through which a resident tells the world: if my heart stops, do not restart it. If I cannot breathe on my own, do not put me on a machine. They are, in the most literal sense, a person's last words on the subject of their own body.
When a facility fails to support that process, the consequence isn't always visible in the moment. No one collapses. No one bleeds. The harm arrives later, in an emergency, when a resident who wanted comfort care gets resuscitated anyway, or when a family member who was supposed to have decision-making authority finds out too late that the paperwork was never completed.
Waveny Care Center has not submitted a plan of correction.
That detail matters. Every facility cited for a deficiency is expected to respond with a timeline and a description of how it will fix the problem. A missing plan of correction means inspectors flagged the issue, handed it to the facility, and the facility has not yet committed to doing anything about it.
The November inspection found six other deficiencies alongside this one. The inspection report does not describe them in this filing. What it does describe is a facility that, on the day inspectors arrived, was not meeting its obligations to residents on one of the most fundamental questions in long-term care: who decides what happens to your body.
Waveny Care Center is a well-regarded facility in one of Connecticut's wealthiest towns. New Canaan is the kind of place where nursing home residents often arrive with private attorneys, financial planners, and family members who know what an advance directive is and have opinions about it. That context makes the deficiency stranger, not less serious. The residents least likely to be harmed by this kind of failure are often the ones with the most resources to advocate for themselves. The ones most at risk are those who arrive without family, without legal representation, without anyone to notice that the paperwork was never done.
The regulatory tag cited here, F0578, covers a cluster of rights that exist precisely because the history of institutional care is full of patients who were treated as objects of medicine rather than subjects of their own lives. Residents in nursing homes have had procedures performed on them without consent. They have been enrolled in research without knowing it. They have died in ways they explicitly said they did not want to die, because no one wrote it down, or because someone wrote it down and nobody read it.
The federal government began requiring nursing homes to honor advance directives in 1990. That is thirty-five years of regulatory history behind this single line in an inspection report.
The scope of this specific violation is listed as isolated, meaning inspectors identified it in connection with a limited number of residents rather than as a facility-wide pattern. But isolated violations in resident rights categories have a way of being undercounted. Residents who don't know their rights weren't honored can't report that they weren't honored. A person who wanted to refuse a treatment and wasn't given a clear path to do so may not recognize that as a violation. They may simply experience it as confusion, or as being ignored, or as the ordinary indignity of being old and dependent in an institution.
Waveny Care Center has not said when it will address this. It has not said how. The inspection report records the deficiency, notes the potential for harm, and leaves the correction status where it stands: unresolved.
The residents living there now are still waiting.
Full Inspection Report
The details above represent a summary of key findings. View the complete inspection report for Waveny Care Center from 2025-11-18 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: August 30, 2026 · Our methodology
WAVENY CARE CENTER in NEW CANAAN, CT was cited for violations during a health inspection on November 18, 2025.
It was one of seven deficiencies inspectors recorded during that visit.
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.