Healthcare Compliance Perspective:
Every resident has the right to be free from abuse, neglect and exploitation. Long term care facilities must educate their staff on Residents’ Rights as well as staff’s responsibility to report any abuse, neglect, or exploitation immediately upon discovery.
The State Department of Health fined three Connecticut nursing homes for violations that were numerous and egregious. They included: failure to respond to a resident after he had been beaten by another resident with a wheelchair foot pedal, non-treatment of a stage-3 pressure ulcer, non-administration of blood thinning medication resulting in a blood clot and non-supervision that allowed a resident to perform a sexual act in front of another resident.
One nursing home in Meriden was fined $3,000, another facility in Wallingford was fined $2,150 and a third home in Waterbury was fined $1,530.
In the incident involving the beating, an RN was observed leaving the room without providing care and a LPN failed to provide care also when the resident was found in his room in a pool of blood. At that time, a resident was standing over the injured resident’s bedside still striking the resident on the head with a wheelchair pedal.
The violation for not properly caring for a pressure wound surfaced when an investigation revealed that a resident’s pressure ulcer was allowed to progress from stage-2 to a stage-3 much larger injury due to incomplete record documentation that failed to show the wound had been properly cared for.
The investigation into the medication error revealed that an LPN had failed to enter the physician’s orders for blood thinner into the computerized physician order system although the nurse had transcribed the orders to a written physician’s order sheet. The error resulted in the resident not receiving the 30 doses of the blood thinner that had been prescribed for a 15-day period. A procedure that was scheduled for this resident had to be cancelled when the cardiologist discovered a blood clot in the resident’s right atrium that may have been the result of the missed medication.
None of the officials from any of the three facilities were willing to comment on the fines or the violations.
