A nursing home resident ordered to be on a soft-food diet choked to death in April after a nursing assistant failed to read the meal instructions and served the resident pieces of ham and a hard cookie, according to a state health inspection report. Officials at the facility told state inspectors that they don’t specifically instruct aides to check residents’ dietary orders before meals because that is supposed to be part of the aides’ certification training. The resident began coughing and chok…

An elderly woman was pronounced dead last week after being hit by a truck in a nursing home parking lot Friday morning. The 81-year-old woman was struck just after 11 a.m. in the facility parking lot by a delivery truck, said police.

According to a recent study published in the Journal of American Geriatrics Society, many elderly care agencies nationwide do not conduct criminal background checks or drug testing for new hires and require little to no real experience or training before putting new employees to work. Of the 180 agencies researchers surveyed in the study, 55 percent conducted a federal criminal background check and only one-third administered drug tests. There are few regulations for elder referral agencies and …

One nursing home threw a party in honor of a resident who reached centenarian status this week. The woman turned 100 years-old on Wednesday. Her birthday just happened to occur on the day of one of the nursing home’s summer cookouts.

Police have accused a woman of stealing jewelry from elderly patients at an assisted living facility. The 26-year-old woman turned her self in to police earlier this week after police accused her of the crimes. The woman had been hired as a private caretaker by the family of an elderly assisted living facility resident.

A man has filed a civil complaint against a nursing home alleging that the facility covered up the cause of his mother’s death. According to court documents filed this month, the man’s mother choked to death as she was being fed by a licensed vocational nurse in July, 2010. The woman had a care plan in place which required her food to be chopped up in order to reduce the possibility of choking.