Today, U.S. Senator Herb Kohl, Chairman of the Special Committee on Aging, held a hearing examining the widespread inappropriate use of antipsychotics among nursing home residents suffering from dementia, high costs to taxpayers and the efforts to find safe and effective alternatives.“When properly prescribed, antipsychotics can offer beneficial treatment for individuals suffering from mental illness,” Kohl said. “However, we have a responsibility to patients and their families to ensure that elderly nursing home residents are free from all types of unnecessary drugs, and we have a responsibility to taxpayers to be certain that they are not paying for drugs that are not needed.”
The hearing highlighted two recent investigations by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS OIG) that looked at the prevalent use of atypical antipsychotics in the face of a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “black box” warning and the high costs to taxpayers.
In examining medical records over a six-month period, Daniel Levinson, Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services, testified that 14 percent of all nursing home residents, or nearly 305,000 patients, had Medicare claims for atypical antipsychotic drugs and that half of these claims should not have been paid for by Medicare because the drugs were not used for medically accepted indications. He said that for one in five drug claims, nursing homes dispensed these drugs in a way that violated the government's standards for their reimbursement.
Full press release and source:
Alternatives to Overuse of Antipsychotics in Nursing Homes Focus of Senate Hearing
Watch the Hearing
5 comments:
Use of inappropriate antipsychotics is an outrageous abuse of the elderly, their families, and the TAXPAYERS!
The Senate & Congress need to hear the truth, about MD's, nurses, and administrators over meds of antipsychotics into seniors many of whom are in dementia. My father was denied his civil rights by being over medicated while in a nursing home.
All involved ignored my wishes to accommodate my father by using behavior therapy and/or other therapies other than the psychotropic drugs which made him disoriented and sleepy all the time.
When I protested their judgment and I demanded environmental intervention, the hospital administrator packed all his belongings into black trash bags and sent him out into the night to a town 45 miles away and into the psych ward for evaluation. Thus, a lawyer had to represent Dad's interests in court.
My father was placed by the judge into a nursing home back into his original home town.
I filed complaints with the State of Michigan against those involved.
It is my observation that there exits poor and inadequate oversight concerning seniors in nursing care especially those with dementia.
"Doctors are hugely over paid to "monitor" only the patients. All they do is give a quick glance at a chart and charge Big Bucks, I would guess $100's per patient. I know for a fact that doctors almost never saw, visited, and touched my father in 5-6 years in nursing care. Only if I protested loudly and complained continuously did they actually look in on him directly. This is a huge waste of our money and it allows doctors to easy and fast riches on the tax payer’s dollar. It is in my opinion immoral and ought to be stopped.
Haven't we been telling them this for a long, long time?!
Yeah, yeah, yeah....another show with no results.
Kudos to Sen Kohl for his persistent concern for the elderly disabled.
During my mother's guardianship case in Cook County, IL, she was moved from her private pay facility into a public aid facility which was against medical advice, and could not meet her needs for a patient with dementia.
Within several days, she had a complete breakdown, and was hospitalized and heavily medicated to get her stabilized.
Upon moving her back into this inappropriate facility, she was more heavily medicated to help her adjust to the facilty. She could not put one foot in front of the other, and fell and was re-hospitalized.
This was all a result of unethical corrupt court proceedings which ultimately resulted in a private for profit guardianship company being awarded guardianship.
What occurred was criminal, and heavily medicating the ward was just an additional example of how uncaring everyone was.
The judge should be impeached.
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