KVUE's findings come after Sandy Martinez says her father, Paul Travio, is one of those residents impacted.
"We had noticed some behavior issues with him, and we couldn't pinpoint what was going on because he started sundowning a lot. He wasn't talkative anymore," said Martinez.
A few months later, Travio's daughter got a call from CVS Pharmacy indicating it was time to refill their father's prescription for Sinemet, a medication to help treat Travio's Parkinson's disease.
She then checked with her father's nursing home. "And it wasn't until then that we had found out that he was not getting his medication properly."
While the state cited Travio's nursing home for medication errors in the past, his family couldn't prove it this time. A KVUE Defenders investigation uncovered their concerns shed light into an increasing problem across the state.
Digging through state records, the KVUE Defenders uncovered state investigators cited Texas nursing homes 1,060 times for medication errors in 2011. In 2013, violations jumped by nearly 200 more.
Of those, staff giving residents 'unnecessary drugs' increased the most by more than 78 percent.
Earlier this year, AARP conducted a study on nursing home care across the country. It found Texas nursing homes inappropriately administer antipsychotic drugs to residents with no mental illness, nearly more than any other state in the country. Texas tied with Louisiana.
Full Article and Source:
Medication Errors Increasing in Nursing Homes
6 comments:
It's not an error when antipsychotic drugs are used to control patients who are not psychotic!
This is happening in many facilities! This is incompetence and criminal in my opinion to give drugs people do not need.
It's so scary, I can't stand it.
And let's not forget the seriously mentally ill, who often cannot get the anti-psychotic medications that would return them to some semblance of normalcy.
Instead, these very necessary drugs are being inappropriately force-fed to the elderly who have age-related physical handicaps and dementia.
All at public expense.
Family members, whenever you see older anti-psychotic medications like Haldol prescribed for a family member, it's a big, red flag that something is wrong here.
Silverado Senior Living routinely drug their residents with the Exelone patch so you cannot see it and also with SEROQUEL, Blood Thinners and to finish them off with Staten drugs to make the residents so sick and the family is conned into Silverado Hospice for comfort care . And in the end the family, resident and Medicare is scammed by double dipping billing and then the resident dies
All drugging with chemical restraints are nothing but torture for the residents and are highly illegal. See my blog at www.marygsykes.com for more information. People has to band together and demand these highly illegal practices stop and make sure that every nursing home resident that wants to go home to live with their loved ones until they pass is allowed to do so. Nursing homes are nothing but ghettos and gulags for the elderly.
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