In April of 2018, Connecticut’s Department of Public Health and the Advanced Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation issued an order requiring an independent evaluation of a New Haven nursing home’s staff to see if they’re indeed able to meet their responsibilities. They ordered this after a preliminary investigation revealed that safety breaches and accusations of patients receiving inadequate care were likely the result of staff shortages.
What’s of most concern to state regulators in this instance is whether the facility upheld their requirement to have no more than 30 patients assigned to a single licensed nurse on each shift. State care ratios also allow no more than 10, 12 and 20 residents to be left under the care of a nursing aide on their first, second or third shifts respectively.
Regulators note that they closely monitor nursing homes and their staffing ratios because their investigations into resident injuries have shown that there’s a direct correlation between a lack of caregivers and these individuals getting hurt.
During the years of 2015 to 2018, there were just shy of 250 cases in which Connecticut nursing home residents were affected by lapses in care incidents. Nearly 10 percent of those cases involved less than two employees attempting to move someone living at one of these facilities. All but eight of those instances occurred in 2017 and 2018.
Nearly a third of the incidents reported were falls, many of which caused residents to suffer broken bones and severe bruises. Almost 15 percent of cases involved these individuals suffering pressure sores caused by staff not adhering to doctor’s orders. In just over 10 percent of other cases, residents were faced with sometimes life-threatening medication errors.
When staffing is short, residents can get seriously hurt or die. Nursing home negligence takes on many forms. The longer that an individual is neglected, the more likely they are to suffer more severe physical impairments or to be emotionally impacted by what they’ve been through. An attorney can help you hold your loved one’s nursing home accountable for the pain that they’ve caused them.
