The next time somebody trots out that old adage about the road to hell being paved with good intentions, tell them to … stick it in their ear.

As it turns out, sometimes good intentions are good enough, and even the difference-maker between ruinous punishment and salvation. Especially if you’re a long-term care provider.

I was reminded of that ironclad irony again Thursday while reviewing colleague Kim Marselas’s news story about a civil lawsuit decision in New Jersey that took a provider out of potential hot water and onto safe, dry land.

A woman filed suit against a nursing home and doctor who sent her home while awaiting results of a COVID test during one of the earliest months of the pandemic. Two days later, she was notified she did, in fact, have COVID-19; her husband subsequently died due to COVID, presumably after catching it from his wife.

Noting that all parties agreed the facility gave prompt notice of the woman’s positive test results, and that staying longer at the facility potentially could have been more dangerous than sending her home, a three-judge panel refused to punish the providers.

The key? The judges said a jury could not have reasonably concluded the provider was indifferent or acted with “thoughtless disregard” of the potential consequences.

In other words, the provider acted with good intentions. It’s not always going to keep an operator’s behind out of the fire, but it happens more often than you might think. And in some of the biggest cases in recent history.

We’ve seen time after time the past few years that judges and juries have refused to penalize providers who made reasonable efforts to take care of their patients and staff while a most unreasonable new pathogen ravaged the vulnerable elderly.

But even long before COVID-19, there were high-profile instances of vilified providers being exonerated, despite mass carnage, due to their good-faith attempts to provide care.

Take, for example, the Hollywood Hills power-outage case that resulted in the deaths of 12 nursing home patients in Florida and the case 16 years earlier that focused on 35 St. Rita’s nursing home deaths in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina blew through. In both instances, nursing home operators were assailed by authorities, politicians, widespread mainstream media coverage and even some of their peers.

In both cases, however, the providers eventually escaped unscathed by their courtroom pursuers.

“It was the fact that the defense could point to good-faith caregiving efforts that pulled providers’ butts from in front of a figurative firing squad,” I wrote last year after the Hollywood Hills case spectacularly collapsed. 

In a passage that bears repeating to a weary caregiving sector, I went on to say, “Remember that: Caregivers using their proper preparation and caregiving practices can stare down the establishment, fend off ravenous mainstream media and, yes, avert potential prison sentences. Good intentions do matter.”

For nursing professionals who may struggle to justify carrying on amid so much frequent negativity, it’s a message that bears keeping firmly in mind.

James M. Berklan is McKnight’s Long-Term Care News’ Executive Editor and a Best Commentary award winner in the 2024 Neal Awards, which are given annually for the nation’s best specialized business journalism. Opinions expressed in McKnight’s Long-Term Care News columns are not necessarily those of McKnight’s.