The Asta Care Center of Elgin, Illinois was recently fined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid after a series of incidents revealed a severe lack of training, leadership, and accountability. It’s incredibly fortunate that no residents were killed as a result.
For one resident, nursing home staff cruelly and unnecessarily refused to provide him with his prescribed pain medications, instead allowing him to suffer needlessly for hours. The resident, a 72-year-old mentally alert individual suffers from end stage renal disease and lymphedema and requires dialysis. Lymphedema is a painful blockage of the lymph vessels causing swelling.
The nursing home repeatedly failed to keep an adequate amount of medication on hand. At one point, a staff member taunted the resident about “congressional hearings” and “DEA laws.” The resident’s pain assessment indicated that the resident “prefers a pain med prior to dialysis and will request.”
Another resident at the Asta Care Center of Elgin wandered from the facility. No one at the facility was aware of her absence until she returned with local Elgin police. Apparently she had walked for some time, and then hailed a cab. The cab driver became concerned and alerted the authorities.
A third resident with a history of nursing home falls was allowed to fall multiple times without any update to her care plan ever being made. When the care plan was finally updated to include intervention methods to avoid further falls, the interventions were ignored.
The assortment of incidents of nursing home neglect that have been recorded are a strong indication that the staff of Asta Care of Elgin are not being adequately trained to cope with the variety of conditions that regularly take place in a nursing home.
Each of these lapses is an incident of nursing home neglect. Residents have the right to live a safe, pain-free life. If you have a loved one who has been injured or neglected in an Illinois nursing home, contact my law offices for a free and confidential evaluation of your case.
Other blog posts on nursing home falls:
Failure to follow recommendations leads to fall and facial fractures at Tower Hill
Delay in obtaining x-rays for fractured hip at Alden of Orland Park
Alzheimer’s patient falls from window at Renaissance of Hillside