CareView Health and Rehab: Medication Storage Failures - WI
Inside was a single bottle of lorazepam, a controlled sedative, labeled with a resident's name and an opened date of December 1, 2024. Nine months old. The Director of Nursing looked at it and said it was expired and shouldn't be there.
She was right on both counts.
The inspection, completed September 3, 2025, was a complaint survey. What it found in the medication storage room painted a picture not of a single oversight but of a room that hadn't been properly checked in years.
A second, larger refrigerator in the same room held two open bottles of eye drops. One contained latanoprost ophthalmic solution. The other held timolol maleate, a medication used to treat glaucoma. Neither bottle carried a resident label or an opened date. Someone had written "PM" on the side of one and "AM" on the side of the other. The Director of Nursing told the inspector she didn't know what the medications were, then acknowledged they should be labeled.
The cabinet search turned up something worse. Four opened boxes of intermittent catheter supplies were stored alongside current medications. Three of the boxes had expired on May 31, 2020. The fourth had expired July 5, 2020. The inspector asked the Director of Nursing to look at the expiration dates. She recognized they were expired and said they would be removed.
More than five years on the shelf.
Earlier that morning, before the medication room visit, a Licensed Practical Nurse had walked the inspector through the storage setup and opened cabinet doors looking for the catheter supplies. When the inspector asked how a nurse would know whether a catheter was expired, the LPN picked one up, studied the label, and said she wasn't sure, but that the one she was holding might be expired. She added that she didn't think any residents were currently using intermittent catheters, though she wasn't certain.
The facility's own storage policy, last revised in April 2007, states that locked compartments must remain locked when not in use and that outdated drugs must not be used. The controlled substance policy requires lorazepam and drugs like it to be kept in a securely locked area with restricted access.
The refrigerator holding the lorazepam had a lock. It just wasn't being used.
Lorazepam is a benzodiazepine, a class of drugs that carries real risks for elderly patients, including sedation, falls, and respiratory depression. Keeping an expired, unlabeled, or improperly stored supply in an unlocked refrigerator creates the conditions for a wrong-patient or wrong-dose error. The inspection report rated the violation as minimal harm or potential for actual harm, and noted it affected one of three residents reviewed.
That framing reflects what inspectors could document, not necessarily what the room's condition had allowed for over the preceding months.
The Certified Medication Aide working the hall that morning showed the inspector that the medication cart was properly organized, drawers sorted by room number, everything labeled and dated. The problem wasn't in the cart. It was behind the locked door that wasn't being locked, in the refrigerator with the lock sitting on top of it, in the cabinet where boxes from 2020 had been waiting for a nurse who never came to pull them.
The Director of Nursing confirmed, when asked, that the refrigerator should have been locked. She said the expired lorazepam should not have been there. She said the unlabeled eye drops should have been labeled. She said the expired catheters would be removed.
What she did not say, and what the inspection report does not record anyone explaining, is how a bottle of a controlled sedative sat in an unlocked refrigerator for the better part of a year, how two bottles of eye drops lost their labels without anyone noticing, or how catheter supplies expired in the summer of 2020 remained in a cabinet through five winters without a single person pulling them out.
Full Inspection Report
The details above represent a summary of key findings. View the complete inspection report for Careview Health and Rehab of Minocqua from 2025-09-03 including all violations, facility responses, and corrective action plans.
Additional Resources
Data source: This article is based on inspection data downloaded directly from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) via Medicare.gov. CMS releases inspection reports in bulk; we publish the findings as documented by state surveyors in the official Form CMS-2567 Statement of Deficiencies.
Plan of correction: The CMS report we receive does not include the facility's plan of correction. Facilities submit plans of correction separately to state survey agencies and those responses may not be reflected in CMS data at the time of publication. The absence of a plan of correction in our data does not mean one was not filed. Readers who want information about corrective steps taken are encouraged to contact the facility directly or their state survey agency.
Corrections may have occurred: Inspection reports reflect conditions observed on the date of the survey. Facilities may have implemented corrections, staffing changes, additional training, or other remediation since the report was issued. We report what CMS provides and encourage readers to seek current information from the facility.
Editorial process: Inspection findings are extracted from CMS source documents and synthesized using AI, reviewed for factual accuracy against the original report by our editorial team.
Professional review: All content reviewed by Christopher F. Nesbitt, Sr., NH EMT & BU-trained Paralegal.
Last verified: September 26, 2026 · Our methodology
CAREVIEW HEALTH AND REHAB OF MINOCQUA in MINOCQUA, WI was cited for violations during a health inspection on September 3, 2025.
Inside was a single bottle of lorazepam, a controlled sedative, labeled with a resident's name and an opened date of December 1, 2024.
Health inspections identify deficiencies that facilities must correct. Violations range from minor documentation issues to serious safety concerns. Review the full report below for specific details and facility response.