Who are the plaintiffs, who are the defendants, and where do the Seven Hills patients stand in relation to them in the Rolland suit?
The plaintiffs are 800 residents of nursing homes in Massachusetts classified as suffering from mental retardation. They include 51 long-term-care patients at the roughly 70-patient Seven Hills Pediatric Center, essentially all of the facility’s long-term-care residents who are age 18 and above. The defendant is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The Seven Hills patients, with cognitive ages below 12 months, do not know about the suit. They have legal guardians (parents, siblings, adoptive parents), 43 of whom oppose the Settlement Agreement and their loved ones’ inclusion in the suit’s plaintiff class.
