Settlement for $1,008,000.00

Plaintiff’s Attorney: Brian Fellows (St. Louis)

STATEMENT OF THE CASE

A nursing home administrator intentionally discarded a video monitor recording of nurse’s activities during time when patient dies from nurse’s failure to respond to critically low blood sugar reading. Co-workers had previously made written complaints against the same nurse for her failure to respond to patients in distress. The nursing home administrator testified she discarded or recorded over the tape recording after viewing it but before a State surveyor arrived a few days later to investigate the matter. Administrator notes indicated the recording showed the charge nurse at the nurses’ station for ten minutes during this emergency paging through records and manuals and on the phone attempting to page the patient’s physician, but never calling 911 during that 10 minutes. The recording also showed the nurse walking to another wing of the home away from the patient’s room after being notified of the patient’s distress.

The nursing home received the 71 year old patient specifically to monitor blood sugar levels while the patient’s physician worked on stabilizing them. The night of the patient’s death, at 1:30 a.m., when the charge nurse eventually responded to the patient’s room and found the patient unresponsive and hypoglycemic, instead of following procedures requiring a call for an ambulance and injection of a Glucagon (a rapidly metabolized form of sugar), the nurse poured Ensure down the unresponsive patient’s throat (an act strictly forbidden by nursing home policy) at which time the patient aspirated the liquid and began choking. Again, instead of calling an ambulance as required by policy and ACLS guidelines, the nurse sent for a suction machine to get the formula out of the patient’s mouth. A few moments later, the patient stopped breathing and CPR was initiated, but again, no one called for an ambulance until CPR had been conducted for about 15 minutes. Once called, paramedics arrived within 3 minutes finding the patient beyond resuscitation.

The nursing home chart contained numerous time changes in the notes surrounding this evening’s tragic events.

The nursing home administrator sent a letter to the decedent’s husband stating the charge nurse did everything correctly and implying the nurse called an ambulance in a timely fashion, when the administrator had already fired the charge nurse for failing to follow procedures.

Five weeks prior to the patient’s death, the nursing home held an in-service training session specifically addressing procedures for emergency response to severe hypoglycemia. Although the charge nurse who failed to follow those procedures had signed the in-service attendance log, the nurse testified she was not in attendance; rather she was required to sign the attendance log in order to obtain her pay check.

When the nursing home hired the nurse, it performed a background check and noted in her file that a previous supervisor would not rehire the nurse because she “tended to over-medicate and felt her license was in jeopardy because [the nurse] was non-compliant with policy regarding chemical restraint.” Thus, the nursing home knew about the nurse’s tendency not to follow policies and general incompetence before it hired her.

After hiring the nurse, the administrator received numerous written complaints about the nurse including a co-worker overhearing the nurse telling a patient she was going to kill the patient if the patient did not stop bothering the nurse.

The patient had stage three lung cancer and weighed approximately 92 pounds at the time of her death.