Healthcare Compliance Perspective – Nursing Home State Fine:
Policies and procedures should be in place and staff need to be educated on the protocol for acting on a resident’s observed change in condition, even when a family member disagrees. A nursing facility is ultimately responsible for providing the quality of care a resident requires.
A state fine assessed a nursing home is being contested by the facility through the state health department’s administrative channels.
The $25,000 fine was issued to the nursing h
ome for allegedly failing to notice that the condition of an 80-year old resident had changed. The man who had dementia had been a resident at the facility for months. He was noted to be lethargic at the evening meal on November 24, but his wife did not want to send him to the hospital for testing. The next morning the wife informed the staff that she had a “gut feeling something was off” and she wanted her husband taken to the emergency room and was taken there. He died four days later from pneumonia and a sepsis infection.
The hospital records indicated that the man was in septic shock and had a build-up of lactic acid in his system. He also was experiencing kidney problems, a higher than normal potassium level and pneumonia.
The wife reported to the hospital that she had noticed her husband getting progressively weaker over the previous two weeks and that he had been displaying an “increasingly altered mental status and decreased activity for the previous two days.
The man was discharged from the hospital to hospice services and died on November 30.
