Healthcare Compliance Alert – Elderly Resident:
The Compliance Officer should review and evaluate with the Compliance Committee the facility’s policies and procedures that are in place for ensuring the provision of a safe environment for all residents and to prevent attacks by one resident against another. Behavior Logs that record the staff’s day-to-day observations of the facility’s residents’ behavior should be in place. Staff should receive ongoing education regarding how to observe, identify and document potential growing aggressive behavior in a resident in the Behavior Log. The Compliance Officer should ensure that an audit is developed and implemented to periodically review the Behavior Logs to note changes and trends in residents’ behavior.
The administrator of a woman’s estate who was a resident in a New Hampshire nursing home when she was attacked by another resident who tried to strangle her. The 82-year-old resident subsequently suffered a fatal heart attack and the Attorney General’s office ruled that her death was a homicide.
The autopsy found that the woman’s death was caused by “hypertensive and coronary heart disease, with a contributing cause of attempted strangulation.”
The 87-year-old male resident who committed the assault suffers from severe Alzheimer’s dementia and he was not expected to be charged in the woman’s death. However, the nursing home has given notice that it plans to ask that some of the liability be apportioned to the resident who committed the assault. The nursing home denies all allegations of negligence regarding the resident’s potential danger to other residents. He has since been relocated to an area hospital.
The plaintiff’s attorney claims the resident’s history of serious mental health issues was known when he was admitted to the nursing home in the fall of 2015, and the nursing home failed in its responsibility to prevent his admission to the nursing home because he could pose a danger to other residents. The suit also alleges that the nursing home failed to provide education and training for its staff “in resident safety, teaching them about the characteristics of dementia, how to identify residents who pose a danger, and how to recognize psychiatric and cognitive disorder symptoms of residents.” Other training the plaintiffs claim should have been done was “how to assess and re-assess residents and monitor their behavior and to relocate or remove residents determined to be dangerous and to provide adequate security to protect residents from each other.”
The resident assailant is said to have shown deviant, “assaultive and stalking behavior toward staff and other residents” before his assault on the deceased resident.
The suit claims that due to the nursing home’s failure to provide adequate security to protect the deceased resident , she was subjected to “mental and physical pain, conscious suffering, fear, terror, apprehension of death, death and loss of enjoyment of life.”
The trial is scheduled for next January and is expected to last about a week.
