Search Efforts Quelled for New Jersey Nursing Home Resident with Parkinson’s Missing for Over Two Months
Failure to prevent elopement of mentally incapacitated residents from the facility, placing them in danger, may be a systemic flaw in the facility’s security system and be considered substandard quality of care and result in submission of false claims
Compliance Perspective – Elopement
Policies/Procedures: The Compliance and Ethics Officer with the Administrator will review policies and procedures involving prevention of elopement and the security system for monitoring mentally incapacitated residents who are mobile.
Training: The Compliance and Ethics Officer with the Director of Nursing and the Maintenance Manager will ensure that staff are trained on elopement prevention policies and procedures, performing regular maintenance on the alarm system to ensure it is operating correctly, and changing door codes on a regular basis.
Audit: The Compliance and Ethics Officer should personally conduct an audit of all doors with alarms to determine if they are functioning properly and staff are responding in a timely manner when an alarm sounds.
A recent article on the evacuation of about 30 residents in a New Jersey Nursing Home due to a high carbon monoxide reading contained a short sentence at the end that was a red flag statement. It simply said that a 65-year-old resident at this nursing home suffering from Parkinson’s disease,diabetes, PTSD, and dementia, had wandered away from the nursing home, and had still not been found. There was nothing reported about what the nursing home did in order to find the man or to prevent such an incident from re-occurring.
For two weeks after the resident had eloped through a basement door, there were several extensive searches organized by police and the resident’s family to find the resident, including the use of drones to search wooded areas for four days. Police distributed flyers requesting help in locating the man, and his family posted requests on social media. Still, the only reports of his being seen were from around the time of his elopement.
