When Frank Fontana went to visit his 83-year-old mother in the hospital last year, he was told she was “no longer a patient.”
He called his brother Peter to find out what was going on. When Peter arrived at St. Barnabas in Livingston, both men learned that their mother, Hoboken resident Anna Fontana, had died overnight – and no one had notified them.
Last week, after urging by Peter Fontana, Gov. James McGreevey signed bill number S-1534 into law. The bill requires hospitals and other licensed health care facilities (including nursing homes and assisted living residences) to adopt procedures for notifying family members or other designated persons of the death of a patient in their facility.
Health care facilities have 180 days following the signing of the bill to comply.
Last year, Peter Fontana, 57, filed a complaint with the state after the death of Anna, who had been a civic leader in Hoboken. Anna had first been treated at St. Mary Hospital in Hoboken for a stomach problem from January to April 2003. Shortly after being released from St. Mary, however, Anna starting having additional complications. “She had a breathing problem, and we had to rush her to the nearest hospital, which was St. Barnabas,” said her son Peter Fontana, who lives in Maplewood.
Anna Fontana stayed in St. Barnabas until she passed away on May 2, 2003.
“She was taken out of ICU and she was put into the regular room because they said she had improved,” said Fontana. “When my brother called me up and said she wasn’t there, the first thing on my mind was that they sent her back to rehabilitation.”
Hospital officials eventually told the brothers that their mother had died at 2:30 a.m. that morning, and that her body had already been transferred to the hospital morgue, with the cause of death having been established as “heart failure.”
After Fontana filed a complaint, he was surprised to find out that there was no law in New Jersey requiring health care facilities to notify a patient’s family in the event of their death. Because of this, no disciplinary action was taken against Anna Fontana’s doctor, a cardiologist, whom Fontana says never called him to notify him of his mother’s death.
“He contacted me on the way to the funeral parlor,” said Fontana. “He said he would come to the funeral and he never did.”
Fontana added that he would have welcomed the doctor to the funeral, saying that it “says a lot” about a person who would do that.
Fontana said he was angered by the way St. Barnabas operated like a “corporation.”
“I vowed it wouldn’t happen to anybody else,” Fontana said. “It doesn’t happen every day, but it does happen, and people don’t do anything about it. But I did, and my brother did.”
Fontana got in touch with New Jersey Senate Majority Leader Bernard F. Kenny Jr. (D-Hudson), whose office is in Hoboken. Kenny sponsored the bill, which was introduced on May 6, 2004. Although the bill was widely supported in the Senate, the Assembly wasn’t as supportive of it.
“The bill started to stall in the Assembly,” said Fontana. “Everything was in control in the Senate, but once it left there, we got concerned. I got a couple of hundred people I know, and they began to e-mail their assembly people asking them to vote for this bill. It became a snowball effect. My brother worked on the Republicans, and I worked on the Democrats.”
Fontana appeared before the Senate Health Committee on May 13 to give testimony supporting the bill. The committee unanimously voted the bill out of committee afterwards.
Much of the bill’s success can be attributed to Senator Kenny, who “helped us out big time,” Fontana said. Fontana added that although both Senator Kenny and his brother Frank Fontana were a major part of the process, many other people discouraged him from trying to do anything.
“People told me I couldn’t fight the system,” Fontana said. “So I changed it.”
Gets results
Fontana was present when Gov. McGreevy signed the bill into law at Drumthwacket, the official governor’s residence in Trenton, on July 9. Fontana has a “long conversation” with the governor, who described Anna Fontana’s situation as “bizarre.”
Right after the signing ceremony, Fontana says he placed a call to president and CEO of the St. Barnabas Health Care System Ronald Del Mauro to inform him of the news, and left a message with his secretary. While the law came too late to help his family, Fontana says he hopes that it will spare other families the pain of finding out about a loved one’s death hours or days after the fact.
“In my thoughts was what happens if some guy in his 80s goes to the hospital to visit his wife, and is told she’s ‘not a patient’ there,” Fontana said. “When people say to me, ‘Thank you,’ that’s a big thing to me. The purpose of this is to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else.”
“There really shouldn’t be a law,” he continued. “It should be decency, but sometimes that doesn’t exist.” Anna Fontana herself played a role in politics, serving as the head of the Republican Party in Hoboken for 20 years. She was a resident of Hoboken for 70 years, where her son Peter was born and raised.
Fontana says that growing up in Hoboken helped give him the strength and proper attitude to fight for this law to be passed.
“I don’t want to forget about it – I wanted to fight,” said Fontana. “When you’re born and raised in Hoboken, you don’t take stuff.”
Anna Fontana had evidentially been aware of her son Peter’s “Hoboken attitude.” He reflected on what his mother had said about him a few days before she passed away.
“She told the doctor in the hospital, ‘Watch out for him. He’s a nice guy, but he can be the other way,’ ” he said with a laugh. “And now they know.”