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When your parents need more care than you can provide at home, you put your faith in the medical professionals at a nursing home. But according to Consumer Reports and a number of government-funded studies, our parents may not be as safe as we think: nursing home negligence and errors are widespread.
If you believe your parents or family members have been injured in a nursing home by nursing home negligence, nursing home elder abuse, a nursing home fall, a fracture occurring in the nursing home, a nursing home medication error, or a nursing home’s inattention to urgent issues like pressure sores, contact a reputable lawyer immediately.
Nursing Home negligence is widespread
Nursing homes have care over some of the most vulnerable people in our society. Yet studies show that a shocking number of nursing homes are not providing good or even acceptable care to their residents.
Consumer Reports has studied nursing homes for the last five years. It says that although the states are supposed to fine nursing homes for violations of health and safety regulations, state enforcement is generally minimal. Often the state enforcement agency is understaffed, and does not have enough funding to defend its fines and decisions if the nursing home takes the issue to court. Consumer Reports describes one horrific incident, in which “a nurse allegedly put a pillow over a resident's face, said, "I'm going to smother you," and then walked out of the room laughing after the patient pushed it off.” The state collected only $600 in fines.
Read the Consumer Reports article.
Drug and pharmaceutical errors
According to a 2000 study, nursing homes often make errors in administering drugs, and more than half of the errors (51%) were entirely preventable. The study, "Incidence and Preventability of Adverse Drug Events in the Nursing Home Setting," was the largest ever of its kind, and was funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA), which is a part of the National Institute of Health (NIH).
According to a press release put out by the University of Massachusetts, which helped conduct the study, an average-sized U.S. nursing home (106 beds) will have “at least 24 adverse drug events and eight "near misses" per year.” The press release conclude that, extrapolating from those findings, every year there are 350,000 adverse drug events among the 1.5 million U.S. nursing home residents. Put in starker terms, every year a nursing home will make a mistake on administering drugs, a mistake so big that it will lead to an adverse reaction, 1 time for every 4.3 residents.
You can read about the study at the National Institute of Health’s website and also at this website.
A study by the state of North Carolina found very similar numbers. The state concluded that its nursing homes made 22.4 medication errors per 100 beds, in a single year period. Some nursing homes made more than 50 errors per 100 beds.
Understaffing
Many nursing homes are chronically understaffed. A study by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) found that if a nursing home provided a daily average of 2.8 hours of care from nurse aides and 1.3 hours from licensed nurses, its residents were less likely to have poor outcomes. But the CMS never adopted minimum staffing requirements, and most homes have significantly fewer hours of care per patient.
Read more at this website and at the Consumer Reports website.
How to prove a nursing home negligence case.
In order to prove a nursing home negligence case, your lawyer will need to be able to show:
(1) Liability: The patient received poor medical care.
When a medical procedure results in a bad or surprising consequence, medical malpractice may have occurred. Under the law, a medical professional is liable when the care he or she gave was below “that degree of care and skill ordinarily employed by the profession generally under similar conditions and like surrounding circumstances” (Georgia definition).
(2) Damages: A death or injury occurred.
If someone in your family died or was seriously injured as a result of poor medical care, you should consult a lawyer.
(3) Causation: The poor medical care caused the death or injury.
People who bring malpractice suits have to prove that the bad medical care caused the bad consequences. Sometimes patients have an easy time proving that link. For example, a nursing home resident who is given the wrong medication may have an obvious, predictable reaction to it.
How do I protect myself from medical mistakes?
For information on how to protect a loved one or yourself from medical mistakes, see this website as well as this one.
How do I pick a good hospital or nursing home?
Survey results for your local hospitals.
To get free hospital ratings, and to purchase quality reports on hospitals and nursing homes, see HealthGrades.com.
See Medicare’s “Nursing Home Compare”, with information about the past performance of nursing homes around the country.
This is an extremely broad and useful array of information about selecting a nursing home.
For other ratings of nursing homes and home health agencies, see (some of these require fees):
http://www.memberofthefamily.net/
http://www.carescout.com/
http://www.aging-parents-and-elder-care.com
© 2007, Lee Tarte Wallace
The contents of this page: (a) should not be considered or relied upon as legal, financial or other professional advice in any manner whatsoever, and (b) may be considered advertising under some state’s Bar Rules. Unless otherwise stated, no article or text at this Internet site is, has been, or will be updated or revised for accuracy as statutory or case law changes following the date of first publication. Always consult with your lawyer and/or your other professional advisors before acting.
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