The elderly residing in nursing homes are often totally dependent on their caretakers. This includes depending on them to administer necessary medications correctly. According to a story in The News Observer, about one third of the nursing home penalties in North Carolina involve medication errors:

Mistakes in prescribing, ordering and dispensing medicine top the list of complaints to state adult care homes.

Residents take as many as 10 medicines a day, and medication aides in adult-care homes across North Carolina must make sure the correct dose of medicine gets to the the right person at the right time. Since 2001, the state has documented the deaths of six residents in cases involving medication errors.

Roughly a third of state penalties -- the most serious are types A and B -- against adult-care homes have involved medication mismanagement during the past year and a half, since the state established a public database of sanctions.

Dealing with the number and consequences of medication errors will require more education for front-line employees and better means of analyzing how errors are made, experts on aging say.

"Good training for both the people who administer the drugs and people who monitor drugs is really imperative," said Thomas Konrad, a senior researcher at the UNC-Chapel Hill Institute on Aging. "These places that are getting type B or type A penalties, it's generally a serious error."

Nursing home medication errors are prolific in every state. If your parent has suffered harm after a nursing home administered the wrong medication or the wrong dose of a medication, please contact us. We are a national law firm with experience with medication error claims. To contact the firm, call toll-free at 1-888-377-8900 or submit the firm's free case consultation form.

Posted December 2007.

Labels: medication error, nursing home injury, nursing home medication error