Florida Nursing Home Lawyer Blog
An employee at an Illinois nursing home was criminally charged with neglect after reportedly failing to perform CPR on an elderly patient who later died at the facility. Local news outlets, citing state health department statistics, indicated this particular facility had been the subject of 44 complaints in a span of seven years. Earlier this year, the facility was named in a nursing home neglect lawsuit in connection with the death of another patient, whose family alleged her death was the result of malnutrition, weigh loss, sepsis and physical injury – all of which contributed to her death. Plaintiffs allege the facility failed to provide decedent with appropriate medical and nursing care or develop and implement an appropriate care plan.
Cardiopulmonary resuscitation is a life-saving emergency procedure that is a combination of chest compression and artificial ventilation conducted when the heart stops beating. It helps manually preserve one’s brain function until further help can arrive. The American Heart Association reports it can double and sometimes triple the chances of survival after one suffers cardiac arrest.
In some cases when elderly patients are very sick, they will request an advance directive that indicates they decline CPR or other life-saving measures, sometimes referred to as “do not resuscitate” or “DNR.” Unfortunately, a lot of these orders may be tucked in a storage drawer or on file with a family doctor – and not quickly available for fast referral in emergency situations. Still, it is the responsibility of the nursing home to make sure that such records are readily available and that staffers are adequately trained. As noted in an article published by The Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine, nursing facilities have a responsibility to implement policies that provide for immediate CPR intervention for residents who don’t have a current DNR order in place. Continue reading →