Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles, P.C.

Reports of deaths and serious complications in patients who have been treated with Negative Pressure Wound Therapy (NPWT) systems has resulted in a warning to acute and long-term health care facilities staff and consumers by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

NPWT is a topical negative pressure, sub-atomospheric pressure dressing or vacuum sealing technique generally indicated for the management of wounds, burns, ulcers, flaps and graphs. NPWT apply negative pressure to the wound in order to remove fluids, including wound exudates, irrigation fluids and infectious materials. The system is thought to benefit wounds healing by removing wound fluid and dessicated tissue, decreasing the level of bacteria in the wound, improving blood flow in the wound and surrounding tissue, promote granulation tissue, and pulling the wound edges together and stimulating cell growth.

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Nineteen-year-old Brianna Broitzman told a judge this week she is not responsible for physically and sexually abusing cognitively impaired residents at the Good Samaritan nursing home in the Albert Lea, Minn., nursing home where she worked as a nursing aide. Broitzman is one of four teenagers charged with abusing 15 residents at the home. She and former coworker Ashton Larson, who was 18 at the time of the incident, are the only two being charged as adults.

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Nursing home officials did nothing to stop a male resident at a La Salle County, Illinois nursing home from sexually abusing 10 female patients and sexually soliciting several others, according to allegations in a report from the Illinois Department of Public Health.

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It was almost unbelievable, the reports of patients being physically and sexually abused by nursing home aides at Good Samaritan Society of Albert Lea in Minnesota. The aides said they didn’t mean any harm when they held down patients, shoved their fingers and hands in their mouths and noses to quiet their cries and screams, rubbed and hit their breasts and genitals, and sexually “humped” them. They simply called it, “work fun, or to get a good laugh.”

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The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued new guidance for nursing home surveyors, offering more clarification for several components of the survey that aim to improve nursing home residents’ quality of life and environment. Under these new guidelines, nursing home surveys will be focused on key areas such as ensuring residents live with dignity, offering choices in care and services, accommodating the environment to each residents’ needs and preferences, and creating a more homelike environment with access to visitors.

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More than a million senior citizens suffer from abuse or neglect in a single year, many of whom live in nursing homes, according to the National Center on Elder Abuse. For every case reported to authorities, more than five go unreported. These startling statistics have rallied the eldercare advocacy group International Network for the Prevention of Elder Abuse (INPEA) to declare a day to raise awareness of the cultural, social, economic and demographic process affecting elder abuse and neglect through community events aimed at promoting understanding of abuse and neglect of older persons.

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Florida state regulators have recently fined Azalea Court nursing home in West Palm Beach, Florida $16,000 after a patient was found on the floor with maggots crawling out of his leg cast, according to On Call with Phil Galewitz, from the Palm Beach Post.

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Iowa Governor Chet Culver signed a bill in to law this week that removes fines imposed on nursing homes that do not meet minimum health and safety standards, according to the Des Moines Register.

Under the new law, nursing homes would no longer be fined for not having competent, licensed administrators or caregivers in their facilities; not having a qualified nurse on duty, or for understaffing at the facility, one of the leading contributors to resident neglect.

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Members of the staff at Bluegrass Care and Rehabilitation Center in Lexington, Kentucky, didn’t think their joke would get out of hand. They would attach sexually explicit song lyrics to photos of residents taken with their cell phone cameras and send them as text messages to other employees. “We were just having fun,” an employee told state investigators. “Everybody was on the cell phone 24/7.”

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Several staff members at a Kentucky nursing home were fired recently after an investigation found that employees had taken inappropriate photos and made audio recordings of residents at the facility, attached them to songs with sexual lyrics, and circulated them to other employees at the nursing home, according to the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader.

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