When Dorothy Moss, and 85-year-old Alzheimer's patient, entered her first nursing home in November 1999, she was walking, talking and feeding herself. A year later she lay dying in a pool of blood.

Moss was moved by family members in and out of three Hampton Roads nursing homes over 12 months. In the first one, she fell out of her wheelchair and suffered a gash in her head. She became emaciated and was hospitalized with severe malnutrition, dehydration and pneumonia, medical records show.

After six months in a second nursing home, she wound up in the hospital again, this time curled up in a fetal position and in critical condition with multiple infected bedsores, which occur when a bedridden patient isn't repositioned often enough.

Her plight ended fatally in November 2000 in a

third home where, medical records show, she began bleeding at the site where a feeding tube entered her body. She died in bed, awaiting a blood transfusion that never came.

"She pretty much lay there and bled to death," said Dottie Merinar of Portsmouth, Moss' daughter. Merinar's complaint against the facility where her mother died was substantiated by state health-care regulators.

Nursing-home operators say their patients receive good care from conscientious professionals and that stories like Moss' are rare.

However, government reports, lawsuits and a review of state nursing-home inspection records by The Virginian-Pilot reveal that dozens of nursing homes throughout the region and the state have incurred stacks of safety and health-care violations.

A legislative study in 2000 found that more than half of Virginia's 275 nursing homes failed to meet federal quality standards. The problems were most severe in eastern Virginia, where three-quarters of the homes were found to be out of compliance.

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