State Fines Nursing Home Over Two Patient Deaths

A Placer County skilled-nursing home was fined $160,000 after two patients died, one after being given the wrong medication and another after she was not hooked up, as ordered, to a ventilation machine.

Colonial HealthCare of Auburn, about 30 miles northeast of Sacramento, received two of the state’s most severe citations, state officials said Thursday.

Officials said a 92-year-old man died Jan. 13 after ingesting glyburide, a diabetes medication that helps stimulate insulin production and lower blood-sugar levels. The patient had neither been diagnosed with diabetes nor prescribed the glyburide, according to an official report.

The man was rigid and unresponsive for nearly four hours before he was transferred to an emergency room, and had a dangerously low blood-sugar level, the report said.

He had been admitted to a hospital earlier in the day but had been released back to the nursing home before developing complications.

In the second case, investigators said the facility failed to provide a ventilation machine to assist a 64-year-old patient with sleep apnea.

Her doctor had ordered the device for the obese woman, who suffered from chronic obstructive airway disease, hypertension and congestive heart failure, the report said. She died Dec. 6, the day she was admitted.

A spokesman for the home’s owner, Horizon West HealthCare, said the claims have “not been proven and have not been independently substantiated.”

The company “has no reason to believe the health of any individual was placed at risk,” J.R. Wilcox said.

He said that the company in recent weeks had brought in a new interim administrator but that her hiring had nothing to do with the state’s allegations.