Healthcare Compliance Perspective:
Skilled nursing facilities are required to provide adequate supervision in order to prevent abuse of a resident, including protection from a resident’s family. The Compliance Officer must follow-up on quality assurance audits involving family-initiated resident abuse to minimize the risk of systemic deficiencies which may lead to allegations of substandard quality of care and fraud.
After what police described as “a domestic incident,” the 88-year-old husband of a nursing home residence walked to the front desk and reported hitting his wife in the head with a hammer. The woman is being treated for two skull fractures at the county medical center and is now out of the ICU. The couple, according to the police, have been married for 60 years. The man who is not a resident of the facility pled “not guilty” to a second degree attempted-murder and first-degree assault charge and is being held in the county holding center.
The daughter of the man came to his defense saying that the attack was out of character for her father. She said that he has been the primary care-giver for both her mother and her brother who has been blind since birth.
Portraying the man’s actions as those of a concerned spouse having to watch his wife’s health decline, the lawyer for the man told reporters that the man has a heart condition and skin cancer. He indicated that the man has been so busy caring for his wife that he has not been able to seek care for himself. The man is reported as having told the police that he wanted to end his wife’s suffering.
