PA Nursing Home Cited for Insufficient Safeguards
A nursing home in Oakmont has been punished by the state and given a provisional license after an 89-year-old woman committed suicide by jumping out her third-story window, reports the post-gazette website. Her son is left full of anguish as to what exactly happened to his mother who had been admitted to the facility in July with heart problems, glaucoma, dementia, and depression. State officials downgraded the Presbyterian Senior Care nursing home known as the Willows nursing home to a provisional license until March 28th because they failed to do enough to stop the death of the 89-year-old woman.
State Inspectors reported finding notes in the facility’s records that stated the woman had “attempted to exit the facility via the stairs in a wheelchair and had expressed a desire to jump out the window.” Where the nursing home failed is that the staff did not inform a physician responsible for her care and did not “develop measures to protect the resident and to prevent injuries”. A urinary tract infection is all that was reported but not her suicidal urges.
A spokeswoman for the nursing home said, “We believe the report has omitted several key facts ... looks like we went from Sept. 19 to Sept. 24 without any type of intervention and that is not accurate.” In addition, she stated that all the windows are now locked down and the staff has been retrained to inform physicians of any major behavior or mood changes in the patients.
A note of interest, according to the woman’s son, is that the woman had complained that she feared one of the caretakers so much that “the last seven days she really became very paranoid, to the point where she had in her possession a knife and put in her sock.” The son is not sure if those concerns were legitimate but he hopes that the provisional license will help “if it would put people more on the ball and aware these things can happen.”
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Source report: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09315/1012401-54.stm
