Healthcare Compliance Perspective:
Each resident’s drug regimen must be free from unnecessary drugs and medication errors. If and when mistakes happen, root cause analyses must be completed. Failure to successfully identify root causes and minimize likelihood of repeated errors can lead to prosecution for resident abuse and fraud.
A 59-year-old nurse with a history of making medication errors has been charged with assault after giving a nursing home resident the wrong medication which caused the death of the resident.
The charge came about as a result of an affidavit that was written by an Arkansas Medicaid fraud investigator in the state attorney general’s office. According to the affidavit, the nurse had 
given both written and verbal accounts about the medication error to the nursing home administration.
The affidavit included documentation detailing five other instances of this nurse making medication errors. These errors involved the nurse-failing to compare a resident’s medication card to medication administration records, injecting a resident with a Vitamin B12 dose after the resident had already received an injection, referring to an older medication card in place of a new card and giving a lower dose of medication, failing to check a medication record and giving Humalog instead of Lantus and giving a resident Aricept without a medication card indicating it should be given, grabbed the wrong medication and gave a resident a pain reliever instead of Ativan used to treat seizure disorders and reduce anxiety. It is not clear whether all of these medication errors occurred at the same facility.
