Nursing Home Responsibilities for Residents with Aspiration Pneumonia

I recently worked on a case where a resident suffered from aspiration pneumonia. And the reason she aspirated and eventually got the infection was because she wasn’t being properly fed. Something a nursing home can do to prevent aspiration is following the care plan specifically. In this case that I worked on, one of the ways that the skilled nursing facility could have prevented my client from aspirating was making sure that she was being fed while she was sitting upright. And not laying down. Because she had been laying down, it caused her to inhale some of her food, and that eventually developed into aspiration pneumonia.

A nursing home has to make sure that they’re following a resident’s care plan exactly. In one of the recent cases I had involved a resident who suffered from dysphacia, and they had multiple choking incidents. Some of the difficulties with dealing with this case had to do with witnesses because the resident had passed because of choking at a facility. We weren’t able to speak with him about what happened, so we had to rely on his family members, staff members, and one of his roommates to tell the story of what happened to him. And he was an aspiration risk because of his dysphasia, but the facility didn’t follow his care plan and didn’t make sure that they were If you were your loved one has suffered from aspiration pneumonia because a skilled nursing facility wasn’t providing proper care, please call Lanzone Morgan and we’ll take a look at your case.