Healthcare Compliance Perspective:
Professional liability exists regardless of the challenges involved with dealing with multiple and often-times conflicting compliance and ethics risk exposures.
An 88-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s disease routinely enjoyed a whirlpool bath before bed at a nursing facility for over three years. But last March, after starting her bath around 8:30 p.m., no one returned to help her get out and into bed. It wasn’t until 4:30 a.m. the next morning that the nursing assistant remembered taking the woman to the shower room hours earlier. When the woman was found, she had died and the whirlpool jets were still running. The pull cord that she might have used to summon help was dangling against the wall beyond her reach.
Allegedly the nursing assistant left the woman, and went to help a resident across the hall who had fallen. Other residents asked for help, and the nursing assistant appears to have forgotten to check on the resident in the whirlpool.
A lawsuit was filed July 5 against the nursing home on the basis of negligence
