Staff at a Concord nursing home gave a 55-year-old paraplegic patient a cup of bleach-based wound-cleaning solution to wash down his morning pills, the man claimed in a lawsuit against the facility.

Steven Sharp, 55 and paralyzed from the waist down, checked in at Diablo Valley Post Acute in April 2024 for six weeks of post-surgery rehabilitation, the lawsuit in Contra Costa County Superior Court said. On his first morning, a staff member handed him a clear plastic cup holding five or six ounces of clear liquid to go with about a dozen pills, and he drank it down with the medications, the lawsuit filed last week alleged.

Sharp felt immediate burning in his mouth and throat, the lawsuit said.

“He alerted the staff that they had given him ‘bleach’ to drink, and that his mouth and esophagus were burning,” the lawsuit claimed.

Sharp, with the burning sensation spreading to his stomach, asked staff repeatedly to call 911, believing he’d been poisoned by the substance, identified in the lawsuit and a paramedics’ report included with it as Dakin’s Solution, which uses bleach as the active ingredient.

The lawsuit accused the facility and its parent company PACS — which across the U.S. owns more than 300 post-hospital care facilities including more than 20 in the Bay Area — of “gross recklessness, deception, and willful delay of medical care.” Sharp claimed he suffered “severe and ongoing bodily injuries and emotional distress.” He is seeking unspecified damages.

A spokesman for Diablo Valley Post Acute, responding to this news organization’s inquiry to PACS about the lawsuit, said the facility has an “unwavering commitment” to providing “safe, compassionate, and high-quality care” to every patient.

“We take all concerns seriously and have initiated a thorough internal investigation into the allegations,” spokesman Dan Kramer said.

The lawsuit echoes a 2022 incident that saw three patients poisoned and two of them die at a San Mateo senior-care facility, with the facility’s owner, care giant Atria, saying a staffer broke policy by filling a pitcher with commercial-dishwashing detergent, and another staffer mistook the liquid for juice and served it. Employee Alisia Rivera Mendoza of East Palo Alto was charged with two counts of felony involuntary manslaughter and three counts of felony elder abuse in connection with the deaths of Trudy Maxwell and Peter Schroder Jr., both 93. Mendoza last month pleaded no contest to felony elder abuse. State authorities fined Atria $35,000 after concluding that employees weren’t properly trained to handle potentially dangerous chemicals.

A similar incident occurred just days earlier at Atria’s facility in Walnut Creek, which led to the death of Constantine Canoun, 94, and an elder abuse conviction and 24-day jail sentence for staffer Lateshia Sherise Starling of San Pablo. State authorities concluded Canoun suffered injuries “consistent with ingesting a caustic liquid cleaning agent,” and that the facility “failed to have staff with adequate competency to provide the services necessary to meet residents’ needs.” Atria was fined $15,000 over Canoun’s death.

In Sharp’s case, about 45 minutes after he drank the liquid, the staffer who gave it to him came into his shared room and said she was “sorry for what had happened,” the lawsuit said. Sharp told her he was in “burning pain” and asked her to call 911 for an ambulance to take him to a hospital for emergency treatment, the lawsuit said. But for more than two hours, facility staff refused to call 911 or tell him “what toxic fluid they had given him,” and no one offered medical care, the lawsuit alleged.

It was only after staff learned that Sharp asked to borrow his roommate’s cell phone to call 911 that a staffer called emergency services, the lawsuit claimed.

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He was taken by stretcher to an ambulance, the lawsuit said.

The paramedics’ report said facility staff told them Sharp drank about a third of an ounce of Dakin’s Solution, but Sharp told them staff brought him about six ounces of clear liquid, which he drank with his pills.

The ambulance delivered Sharp to the emergency department at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Walnut Creek, where, the lawsuit said, “doctors consulted with a poison control center, confirmed that Sharp had ingested Dakin’s Solution four hours earlier, and rendered appropriate medical care.”