Nursing Home Errors

Nursing homes are charged with ensuring the safety and health of the population’s most fragile members. Each nursing home is responsible for a wide variety of events that are all designed to ensure that the residents of the nursing home are cared for adequately and suffer as few injuries and ailments as possible. Unfortunately, nursing homes do not always fulfill this purpose and make any number of mistakes.

One of the most common mistakes in any nursing home is medication error. The nursing home staff will switch patient medications or just hand out the wrong dosage. This is a very dangerous thing, considering the potentially high number of patients who are on a large number of medications.

Medication errors can result in any number of negative consequences. The most common results of medication errors are confusion, oversedation, hallucinations, and bleeding. Warfarin, a blood thinner, and antipsychotic drugs caused the most problems. Other side effects of medication errors include death and internal bleeding.

In addition to handing out the wrong prescriptions, nursing homes have the ability to prescribe a pain killer that is over the counter. This can be a problem as many of the common over the counter drugs have an adverse effect on the elderly. In addition, it may be possible for the over the counter drug to interact badly with the prescription medications also being taken.

Contact a Philadelphia Nursing Home Abuse Lawyer

If your loved one has suffered in a nursing home due to their negligence or intentional actions, contact the Philadelphia nursing home abuse lawyers of Lowenthal & Abrams, P.C. at 215-329-7511.