Healthcare Compliance Perspective:
Failure to provide adequate supervision and response to alarms intended to prevent accidents and hazards to skilled nursing facility residents constitutes substandard care, and represents potential false claims.
Failure to respond to an alarm and providing misleading or inaccurate information on a medical chart are the reasons behind the charges that they failed to do their jobs against two former nursing home employees in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The accused workers will enter their pleas to those charges this week.
The elopement of an 85-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s from the nursing home happened almost one year ago, and resulted in the woman’s death due to hyperthermia after 7 hours outside in the night’s freezing temperatures.
One of the former employees faces up to a maximum penalty of one-year in jail for allegedly “providing misleading or inaccurate information on a medical chart.” The log sheet that records half-hour bed checks on the residents included the deceased woman even though she had left the facility. The former worker admitted to investigators that she had heard an alarm go off, but she was with another resident and did not check to see if anyone had left the building.
The other former employee has already pleaded “no contest” to “second-degree vulnerable adult abuse for allowing the woman to get outside unnoticed.” She will be sentenced in November and faces a possible four years in prison.
The family of the deceased resident is suing the nursing home.
