Assisted Living Facility Found Guilty of Nursing Home Neglect in Patient’s Elopement Death
An investigation by a state department of health has found the Jones-Harrison assisted living facility guilty of nursing home neglect in the death of a dementia patient who left the residence and wandered off last November. The report says that nursing home workers thought the woman had gone home with a family member.
However, while a relative did sign the woman out of the nursing home the day before the incident, she did bring the patient back to the assisted living facility. She did not, however, sign the resident back in.
It wasn’t until the next morning that the missing woman was discovered near a parking garage. She had no pulse and had frozen to death. She died from hypothermia due to exposure to the cold. The same family member who had checked the patient out says that nearly 17 hours after the woman was last seen, the nursing home still hadn’t called the cops.
According to investigators, a maintenance worker who left the facility on the day the patient wandered off had left a cyclone gate door open. The worker said that he purposely did not take the time to lock the door because he was cold and wanted to get to his vehicle as quickly as possible.
The health department determined that the assisted living facility and the maintenance worker were both negligent in causing the woman’s death. The report found that Jones-Harrison failed to properly oversee the resident registry and did not put into action in a timely manner the protocol for dealing with missing persons.
Wandering/Elopement
If your loved one is a nursing home patient who needed supervised care and he/she got hurt after wandering off the property undetected and without supervision, you may have grounds for a Chicago nursing home neglect lawsuit . Fall accidents, becoming the victim of a violent crime, hypothermia, dehydration from severe heat, and getting hit in an Illinois car crash are some of the reasons why patient elopement from a nursing home can be so dangerous.
Minneapolis Nursing Home Guilty of Neglect in Patient's Freezing Death, MyFoxTwinCities, May 20, 2010
Related Web Resources:
Preventing Elopement, Repertoire, March 2008
Dementia and Alzheimer’s Care, Helpguide.org
