Patient waited 2½ hours for pain medication after crash
Half of Massachusetts nursing homes are understaffed, the Associated Press reported. Lynette Couture, 55, waited more than two hours for pain medication at Plymouth Harborside Healthcare last fall, an experience she documented in a journal and described as excruciating.
The 55-year-old was recovering in the rehab unit after a car crash shattered her left leg. Doctors drilled a metal device into her bones to reconnect them.
Couture asked staff for pain medicine three times between 9:40 and 10:40 one night in September, according to a journal where she logged her care. Her call light remained on past 11:20, 11:35, midnight and 12:10, her journal shows. Couture called the nursing station from her cell phone twice but no one answered, she told The New Bedford Light. A non-medical staffer who was working a double shift finally got a nurse to give her the medication at 12:15 a.m. — more than 2½ hours after she first asked.
“The angrier I got, the more I cried,” Couture said. “I made it known to everyone that walked past my room: it was excruciating.”