Unfortunately, there are very serious incidents and accidents that will occur in your community no matter the precautions you take to avoid them. It could be as simple as a resident taking a fall while being involved in your activity programming all the way to an attack on a resident by a staff member or another resident. The Maryland Office of Health Care Quality mandates reporting any incident that affects the health, safety, and well being of a resident- check out the regulation below for how to handle
these situations:
.31 Incident Reports.
A. Staff of the assisted living program shall complete an incident report within 24 hours of having knowledge that
an incident, as defined in Regulation .02B(35) of this chapter, occurred.
B. The assisted living program shall make incident reports available on the premises to the Department and any
government agency designated by the Department.
C. All incident reports shall include:
(1) Time, date, place, and individuals present;
(2) Complete description of the incident;
(3) Response of the staff at the time; and
(4) Notification, including notification to the:
(a) Resident, or if appropriate the resident’s representative;
(b) Resident’s physician, if appropriate;
(c) Program’s delegating nurse;
(d) Licensing or law enforcement authorities, when appropriate; and
(e) Follow-up activities, including investigation of the occurrence and steps to prevent its reoccurrence.
Pro Tip:
The OHCF takes these matters very seriously. You do not want to be in a situation where you did not file an incident report and have a surveyor come in to investigate this incident based upon a complaint call. Be proactive, do not hide anything, and use these incident reports to continuously improve your practices