The Chicago Sun-Times reported the guilty plea of the infamous “Angel of Death” Marty Himebaugh who was a nurse charged with overmedicating residents at Woodstock Residence nursing home where six patients died suspiciously. As part of the guilt yplea she admitted she gave one patient a drug he had never been prescribed. “Marty Himebaugh — whom McHenry County prosecutors said
NY Times had an article about the overuse of certain medications in elderly residents. Below are excerpts of the article. Ramona Lamascola thought she was losing her 88-year-old mother to dementia. Instead, she was losing her to overmedication. Last fall her mother, Theresa Lamascola, of the Bronx, suffering from anxiety and confusion, was put on
Warren Wolfe of the Star Tribune in St. Paul, Mn. wrote a great article on the overuse of medications in the nursing home population. Thousands of nursing homes nationwide are using powerful antipsychotic drugs to quiet disruptive people with mild dementia — at times a step that’s easier and cheaper than training staff to fix the problem.
The Wall St. Journal has a great article on the use of medications to sedate residents because of short staffing at many nursing homes. Below is an excerpt from that article. Medicaid has spent more money on antipsychotic drugs for Americans than on any other class of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, AIDS drugs or medicine
The family of Florence Pierpoint, a 79-year old nursing home patient who was killed while in the care of a Tacoma nursing home, filed a lawsuit after a medical examiner ruled her death a homicide caused by a morphine overdose. The complaint includes charges that the facility’s staff failed to administer medications according to the physician’s orders and
Seniors in Ont. nursing homes overprescribed antipsychotic drugs: study In the nursing homes with the highest antipsychotic prescribing rates, 16.6 per cent of patients with neither psychosis nor dementia were given the drugs, according to a recent study. Ontario nursing homes are too quick to give vulnerable seniors antipsychotic drugs to keep them calm, suggests