About one third of the nursing home penalties in many states 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."

Evidence of Nursing Home Malpractice—Various federal, state and local laws protect nursing home residents and specify procedures that must be followed for the health and safety of those residents. Violation of those laws may subject nursing home operators and staff to criminal and civil penalties. Those statutes also define the standard of care that must be followed by the nursing home. Violations are evidence of negligence.

Compensation for Nursing Home Malpractice—If a nursing home fails to administer adequate care, you or your loved one may be entitled to compensation. This compensation may cover medical bills, pain, suffering, disfigurement and even losses suffered by the resident’s family if the resident happens to die as a result of the situation.

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