When your loved one is in a nursing home, they are often out of the care or control of watchful family members. While you would like to think that they are safe in this environment and getting the care they need, this is sometimes not the case. Something as simple as taking medications can become a gateway for abuse. Nursing home staff make medication errors regularly. Some are intentional, which are grounds for nursing home litigation.

What Are Medication Errors?

The FDA defines medication errors as "any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm while the medication is in the control of the healthcare professional, patient, or consumer." These errors can occur at any point throughout the medication use system.

Most nursing home errors occur at the point of administration and fall into two categories. These categories are:

Careless Errors - The nurses, CNAs, and med. techs in the nursing home give many doses of medications throughout the average work days. Most homes have systems ensuring the correct dose is given to the right person at the right time. Unfortunately, this does not always happen. 

Examples of careless errors include:

• Wrong doses of a patient's medication given
• Other patient's medication given
• Medications omitted
• Drugs administered at the wrong time

Staff usually cause careless errors by taking shortcuts, not following the systems in place, or being overworked. 

Intentional Misuse - In some cases, medication errors are intentional and used as chemical restraints. Medical staff use antipsychotics or other classes of drugs to keep the patients docile or asleep.

Sometimes these drugs are prescribed for patients with no supporting medical history for taking them. At other times, off-labeled medicines that systems do not track are used for these purposes. In either case, intentional misuse is inexcusable and is a crime often performed for the staff's convenience. 

What Can You Do?

When visiting your loved one, look for changes in their personality. Ask the nursing home for a list of their medications upon admission and ask for notifications when the doctor adds or removes drugs. Review the reasons for these medications with their personal physician. 

Any of these errors can be life-threatening events that fall into the category of neglect and are grounds for litigation. Contact a nursing home litigation lawyer if you feel your loved one has been a victim of nursing home medication errors.