How Medication Errors Turn into Nursing Home Abuse
Unfortunately, nursing home abuse occurs more often than you might think. While many forms of abuse leave physical marks (like a scratch or bruise), some forms of abuse leave invisible scars, which are no less harmful than physical abuse. Besides financial and emotional abuse, this is also the case of medication errors, which occur when someone makes a mistake in prescribing, dispensing, and giving medications.
Examples of Medication Errors in Nursing Homes
While medication errors exist in many settings, our concern here is for the instances in nursing homes. Here are just a few specific ways that medication errors occur in these facilities:
- Cutting/slicing pills that aren't supposed to be split
- Providing inadequate liquids, antacids, or food
- Failing to mix, shake or roll the medication
- Not following enteral nutritional formulas
- Improperly giving eye drops
- Having residents swallow sublingual medications
Nursing home medication errors generally fit into two categories:
- Careless mistakes
- Intentional drug misuse
Although it’s helpful to describe the medication errors by category, it's important to understand that regardless of classification, in the eyes of the law, medication errors hurt residents and are considered nursing home neglect or abuse.
Careless Mistakes
This occurs when a nursing home staff member inadvertently or mistakenly messes up the medication for the nursing home resident. It can occur by missing medications (omissions), duplicating medications, dosing errors, or via drug interactions. Specifically, some dosing errors can happen in the following ways:
- The staff member gives the resident the wrong dose of their medication
- The staff member gives the resident another resident's medication
- The staff member improperly administers the medication (providing the meds at the wrong time)
- The staff member fails to administer the doses of medication at all, so the resident doesn't receive the benefit of the drug
While careless errors may occur due to several reasons, they are generally the result of general nursing home problems, such as understaffing and overworking employees; an employee may have confused medications with similar names due to being overly tired. However, the nursing home residents need the appropriate doses of their medication to help keep them healthy, both physically and mentally, and in the most extreme cases-- to survive; therefore, careless mistakes can't be tolerated in this environment. When an unintentional mistake happens, it's considered neglect, which is a form of abuse.
Intentional Misuse
There may be no excuse for careless medication mistakes, but intentional misuse is indefensible. Unfortunately, this is something that happens in nursing homes, especially when it comes to purposefully misuse
chemical restraints. Although it may be acceptable for chemical restraints to be used in limited circumstances, nursing home staff members often use generic antipsychotic meds (without permission) as a means to keep residents passive and compliant, even for those who don't have any clinical reason for taking that medication.
What to Do About Medication Errors in Nursing Homes?
Medication errors are not only a sign of incompetence in the nursing home, but also a sign of neglect, or abuse in the case of intentional misuse. If your loved one was harmed by a medication error in their nursing home, there may be legal actions to recover compensation for the mistake. Reach out to one of our skilled Walton Law attorneys who can explore your options.
Contact us right away to begin.