Prescription Drug Errors May Be Concealed by Nursing Home Management or Staff
A pharmaceutical journal’s review of a recently conducted study concerning the prevalence of prescription errors in nursing homes found that while the total number of errors was relatively high, the prevalence of incidents that result in serious complications from the mistakes was surprisingly low. There could be several reasons for the higher-than-normal rate of prescription errors in nursing homes.
For one, nursing home residents are more likely than the general population to be receiving medical treatment that includes prescription medication. Nursing home staff may be responsible for dispensing out hundreds of medications from different doctors and pharmacies to various patients, who may not be verifying that they are receiving the correct medicine or dosage and could be harmed as a result. The study found that the level of serious incidents due to these errors was lower than expected, which the authors of the article attributed to the possibility that the errors that led to serious problems were being underreported or misclassified.
Nursing Home Residents’ Condition May Worsen for Various Reasons
Residents of nursing homes often have serious medical problems for which they are being treated while living at a nursing facility. If a prescription error is made by a pharmacy or employee of the nursing home and causes a significant injury, illness, or death, the nursing home employees and management may not wish to reveal the error leading to the resident’s complications and instead attribute it to a more common or accidental cause.
This pattern of blaming negligence on an unrelated cause for which the home would not be liable occurs frequently in nursing homes with all sorts of illnesses, injuries, and complications. If a resident or their family does not suspect a medication error resulted in harm to the resident, they may never check the records. Worse yet, the records may not have been properly kept to document which medications were actually dispensed to the residents and by whom.
Victims of Nursing Home Prescription Errors Are Entitled to Relief
Nursing home residents who are affected by prescription errors are often in a difficult position because it may be hard to find the cause of their health problems. If it is determined that a resident was given the wrong medication by the staff or a pharmacy as a result of a prescription error, the residents or their family may be entitled to damages. In cases in which the nursing home management actively works to conceal or destroy evidence of the true source of a serious error, victims and their families may be entitled to additional damages or other procedural benefits, such as the extension of the statute of limitations for filing a nursing home prescription error claim for relief.
Maryland Nursing Home Abuse and Prescription Error Attorney
If you or a loved one has suffered from an illness or injury while a resident at a nursing home, and you suspect it is a result of a prescription error or other neglect or abuse, you may have a case for damages against the parties responsible for the mistake. The Maryland prescription error and nursing abuse lawyers at Lebowitz & Mzhen, LLC may be able to help you seek the compensation your loved ones and you deserve. Our skilled Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. attorneys can fight to hold nursing homes up to the standard of care that they guarantee. We can take action to alleviate the harms caused by a serious prescription error or another act of neglect or abuse. At Lebowitz & Mzhen, we represent clients in Maryland, Northern Virginia, and the entire Washington, D.C. area in all nursing home abuse and neglect cases, including prescription mistakes. Call us toll-free at 1-800-654-1949 or contact us online to schedule a free consultation today.
Filed under: General Problems
The six years I worked in an LTC specialty pharmacy was a huge eye opener. I was appalled at the number of reported med errors that had nothing to do with us. In addition to a nursing staff that was scary in terms of incompetence in some facilities, I quickly had to become an expert in some aspects of what was considered the purview of the nursing profession. Why? Because I would take phone calls from the personnel at some of the facilities asking me questions that concerned issues that I reckoned were considered basic required knowledge to obtain a nursing license.
Some of the pharmacist facility consultants that I worked with would have to drop everything and report to one of their facilities when the call came in that a state survey team had just shown up at the facility. Part of the presence of the surveyor was to be available to represent the pharmacy in answering concerns that the surveyors had related to pharmacy. The other reason was that the nursing staff would come up with some pretty creative responsibility dodges to their errors, responsibility dodges that almost always entailed an attempt to throw the [pharmacy under the proverbial bus.
One of the scariest things was to realize that most facilities employed one or maybe two physicians who oversaw a group of midlevels, mostly Nurse Practitioners aka NPs. The NPs were the ones that drove day-to-day care of the residents. Most of these NPs were freshly minted, former Rns who now had a new set of letters behind their name and were accorded prescribing privileges. I’d get several phone calls in the course of a shift from NPs out of the couple of dozen+ SNFs and transition facilities. These phone calls were to ask what the best drug was for patient A with a list of chief complaint and accompanying diagnoses or a new diagnosis. Then I was asked for the correct dose, interval for dosing, which HOA set to take into account dietary considerations for the med, etc. I impressed the NP with the fact that I cannot prescribe and only recommend pursuant to the line of questions from the NP. A few minutes later, the order would get faxed over verbatim to what I had suggested. The NP ha signed the order. Who really wrote that order?
I ended up designing comprehensive pain management regimens, tapering regimens, catching duplicate Tx, potentially fatal interactions that the computer would not flag because the dependent morbidities were not in the patient profile, deducing that a patient had lymphoma based on some lab reports for another condition that we were monitoring and was in the H&P from the admission supplied by the acute care hospital. The last page did not transmit. The nurses, the dietician, the NP, the doc….all were oblivious and scratching their heads as to why the labs and the patient’s presentation was as it was. Their reason for admission was for an unrelated trauma.
My favorite (not) was when the nurse would call and ask for a recommendation and I’d remind the nurse that I’m recommending and not prescribing. I’d then hear, “Oh, the doctor said to write down what you recommended and send it as an order and he’d sign the HC in the morning. The order would come over as a faxed T.O. transcribed by the nurse I talked to as resulting from a phone call with the physcian. from the physician. Did she really talk to the doc? I thought that the probability was no. But I had no way of knowing and the orders always got signed by the doc as promised.
Avoid ending up in a nursing home, if possible, is my advice. There are some good ones and there are many dedicated and competent professionals staffing nursing homes. The crap shoot is diiscerning which one will heal you and which one will put you in the ground.
Really you haven’t worked in a bit…. I haven’t talked to any nurse or assistant in 25 years that spoke more than two words of English…