Failure to Individualize Elopement Care Plan and Provide Supervision During Off-Site Appointment
Penalty
Summary
The deficiency involves the facility’s failure to ensure a resident at known risk for elopement had adequate, individualized care plan interventions and supervision to prevent elopement. The resident had a history of mental health problems, impaired decision-making, and expressed desires to leave the facility, including plans to travel to another state to visit friends who were deceased or incarcerated. An elopement/wandering risk evaluation completed in early September identified the resident as an elopement risk and recommended increased monitoring, staff notification, and care plan updates. The resident’s sister (POA) reported that the resident did better when compliant with medications and became more irrational and impulsive when he stopped taking them. She also reported, on multiple occasions, that the resident expressed anger about being placed in the facility and a desire to leave, including to visit friends in another state. Despite these known risks and repeated verbalizations of intent to leave, the resident’s care plan did not incorporate specific interventions discussed with the family, such as supervised walks, supervised medical appointments when the sister could not attend, or interventions tied to medication refusal and increased elopement risk. The care plan contained general wandering/elopement interventions (e.g., redirection, hourly monitoring, diversional activities, elopement risk assessments) but did not address the resident’s specific behaviors, his stated plan to travel out of state, or his sleep disturbances and nighttime pacing. Nursing progress notes documented the sister’s concerns about the resident’s ongoing desire to elope and resentment about being in the facility, as well as an incident where the resident attempted to sign himself out and leave the facility, but there was no corresponding update to the care plan to reflect these escalating behaviors. The facility also failed to provide routine behavioral monitoring for the resident’s elopement-related behaviors and did not have behavior monitoring orders in place for wandering or exit-seeking from September through mid-December, despite documentation of nighttime pacing and lack of sleep. On the day of the elopement from a dental appointment, the transport staff member was aware the resident was an elopement risk and that staff were expected to stay with such residents during outside appointments. The appointment calendar specifically noted that staff were to stay with the resident due to elopement risk. Nonetheless, the staff member left the resident unsupervised at the dental office to run an errand, and during this unsupervised period the resident left the office, called a taxi, and went to a relative’s home. The facility then treated the situation as if the resident were leaving against medical advice and did not complete an interdisciplinary after-action investigation or documented root cause analysis of the elopement. An updated elopement evaluation was not completed until four days after the resident’s return, and the post-readmission care plan remained largely generic, without incorporating the family-agreed stipulations or individualized interventions to prevent recurrence. The facility’s own policies required an elopement/wandering evaluation to be completed post-elopement, an IDT investigation with root cause analysis, and care plan updates after any incident involving unsafe wandering or elopement. Staff interviews confirmed that the expectation was to review and revise the care plan after an elopement and to conduct behavior monitoring for residents identified as elopement risks. However, for this resident, there was no documented IDT after-action plan, no timely post-elopement evaluation, and no documented care plan revisions that reflected the specific risks and conditions that had been identified by staff and family prior to and following the elopement. These omissions, combined with the failure to maintain supervision during transport to a medical appointment, led to the resident leaving unsupervised and constituted the cited deficiency in accident hazard prevention and supervision. The facility’s failure to address these concerns placed this resident at a continued risk of elopement and/or harm.
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