Temperatures fell below zero that night
Posted by Patti on March 15th, 2007 / Print This Post
Here’s a reason why residents who wander, can end up dying outside on a cold night.
MARION, Ind. (AP) Indiana regulators say the staff of a Marion nursing home failed to look in on an Alzheimer’s patient the night he wandered outside and froze to death.Staffers at Bradner Village Health Care found the body of 76-year-old Clarence Elliott at about 3 a.m. on February 15 outside a locked door of the home. Temperatures fell below zero that night.
State regulators found that staff did not check Elliot’s bedroom at 10 p.m. or midnight on the night he died. The department also determined that Bradner did not notify Elliott’s family or his primary physicians of his death.
A Bradner administrator says corrections have been made, including firing two employees. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will determine whether the home should be fined.
HEAD COUNTS. Real ones. Where you actually go into the residents rooms and check their beds…and feel for a human being under the covers. And on bitter cold nights…more often than once every couple hours. A human being will die in less than 15 minutes being out in that cold.
March 16th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
Let’s be realistic though. WHO has time to do a bed check every hour never mind 15 minutes or 30 minutes. Every door should be alarmed; every resident should wear a wander guard; everyone should be required to check the beds not just the aides. It doesn’t take any skill to feel a bed for a person. I read that most of these escapes seem to happen around change of shift too- maybe it’s time to have staff watching the residents at those times and getting report later.
March 16th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
I agree with you Cheryl it is hard to find time to do the bed checks. Where I work the rule is you have to see flesh or movement , that goes for everybody. At one point in time,at shift change both shifts would walk through the floor and make sure everybody was ok and everything was restocked but we stopped that for some reason
March 19th, 2007 at 11:26 pm
No way can hourly head counts be done. In a perfect world. Or if they had someone else do it besides the aides or nurses.
March 20th, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Day care centers manage to do head counts, every 30 minutes. And they have as many staff as nursing homes do. Kids are a lot harder to keep track of. Elderly tend to stay in the same areas.
I think we can do better. But we have to change our attitude.
March 23rd, 2007 at 11:54 pm
That’s a good point Kim. Maybe we should learn from day cares. About how to do this better.