Lawyers ad litem help medically fragile kids leave nursing homes.

The medically fragile infant was housed in a wing of a nursing home designed for geriatric patients in Tampa, and the child's parents lived more than 400 miles away in Pensacola.

Guardian ad Litem Executive Director Alan Abramowitz asked Paolo Annino, the Glass Professor of Public Interest Law at Florida State University's College of Law, to serve as the baby's attorney ad litem.

Now, the infant has been moved to a loving medical foster home in Pensacola, where the baby gets held and hugged a lot more, and his parents are able to visit often and are working toward a chance at reunification.

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"This is a case where everyone worked together. The amount of work the GAL did was amazing in this case," Annino said. "Everyone was focusing on the child, and everyone realized the appropriate place for this baby was not in a nursing home."

Though the infant is a "DCF [Department of Children and Families] child," where there have been findings of abuse or neglect, Annino said, parental rights have not been severed. Bringing the baby back to Pensacola, he said, "will help the possibility of reunification" and, if that happens, the parents would need to receive a tremendous amount of help to care for their child.

Important right now, Annino said, is the one-on-one attention the baby receives from medical foster parents, where medically fragile children are given "lots of hugs and rubbing heads and hands. With really young children, tactile attachment is so important."

Annino, who handles such cases pro bono, praised Abramowitz for his efforts at receiving funding from the Legislature to hire attorneys ad litem for medically fragile children and coordinating their legal representation.

Because of a $325,000 legislative appropriation, the number of medically fragile foster children in DCF's custody has been winnowed down from 35, before the law was passed, to the current 11 living in skilled nursing homes.

Personally visiting each medically fragile foster child housed in Florida's nursing homes, Abramowitz has witnessed tiny bodies hooked up to ventilators and felt voiceless children's eyes track him as he moved across the room.

"These children are special. It stays with you when you see them," Abramowitz said, noting that three Florida nursing homes have closed down or stopped taking kids, leaving the state with only four nursing homes handling medically fragile children.

"In fact, DCF doesn't want these children there either,"...