New York Nursing Home Abuse Lawyer Blog

The death of an elderly St. Louis nursing home resident has prompted a lawsuit against the facility. Aubrey Giles, who suffered from dementia, went missing from the Midwest Rehab and Respiratory Center in January, and his body was found in the woods two days later in a wooded, frozen ravine nearby. He reportedly died of hypothermia.

The four-count lawsuit filed in St. Clair County Circuit Court alleges that the home was aware that Giles had a pattern of trying to leave the facility (sometimes referred to as "elopement"), yet failed to monitor him and failed to have appropriate interventions in place to prevent him from exiting the premises. The family further alleges the nursing home violated various state regulations, failed to provide adequately supervise its staff, and failed to notify authorities in a timely fashion.

Daughters sue Belleville nursing home over death of man who walked away, Nicholas J.C. Pistor, Post-Dispatch, February 22, 2012.

A Registered Nurse and a Certified Nurse's Aide at Beth Abraham Health Services, a Bronx Nursing Home, were recently sentenced after being prosecuted by the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit of the New York Attorney General's Office. A mentally and physically disabled resident with a propensity to wander, eloped from the facility while under the care of RN Dorothy Bain and C.N.A. Vicky Williams. The facility's video surveillance revealed that the resident was not in the facility for six hours. Over that six hour span, both employees documented caring for him and RN Bain documented that she had administered medications to the resident. It is unclear whether the resident was injured as a result of the incident. Allowing a resident to elope from a nursing home facility is obviously fraught with danger. We have handled cases where elopement has resulted in falls, fractures and even death. Here, the nursing staff compounded the problem by falsifying records.

Both Bain and Willaims were sentenced to a one-year Conditional Discharge with the conditions including the surrender of their respective licenses. They both must also refrain from working in the health care field for the duration of the Conditional Discharge.

Website Resource:

Long-Term-Care Community Coalition, Enforcement Actions.

The Hamptons Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing, located on the east end of Long Island, failed to meet minimum standards in a Department of Health deficiency survey dated August 23, 2011. The survey noted issues regarding several areas of care, including proficiency of nurse aides and avoiding significant medication errors.

In large part, the quality of a facility's nursing staff correlates with the quality of care that a resident receives. Nurses and nurse's aides interact with and care for residents constantly. For this reason, section 483.75(f) of the CFR states that nurse aides must demonstrate competency in skills necessary to care for the residents' needs. The DOH found that this level of care was not present in its review of The Hamptons Center. In one instance, a knee separator that had been ordered by a physician was not in place for a resident lying in bed. Separators such as this serve several important functions, among them a higher comfort level for the resident and the prevention of pressure ulcers. Failure to implement the knee separator, contrary to the physician's orders, posed a potential for more than minimal harm according to the DOH.

Elderly nursing home residents rely on their caregivers for the administration of necessary medications. As such, the CFR provides that it is the duty of the facility to ensure that residents remain free of any significant medication errors. The DOH report documents a resident who went three days without receiving a physician-ordered prescription because it had not been received from the pharmacy. For this particular resident, whose diagnoses included atrial fibrillation (irregular heart beat) and hypertension (high blood pressure), this failure to medicate could have had severe consequences. Heart conditions are serious matters for a patient of any age. In an elderly nursing home resident, this failure to medicate exacerbates the risk of harm to the resident.

To read the full report of deficiencies for Hamptons Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing, see the DOH website.