Brownsburg Health Care Center: Glucometer Cleaning Failures - IN
The sequence of events began on the evening of May 26. At 7:45 p.m., RN 6 finished checking Resident B's blood sugar, carried the glucometer to the medication cart, and wiped the strip insertion area with an alcohol prep pad using an ungloved hand. The wipe lasted a couple of seconds. He then set the monitor on the cart and went back to passing medications.
When an inspector asked about his cleaning procedure, RN 6 said he was out of the wipes he normally used.
The Director of Nursing arrived at 8:10 p.m. and handed him a tub of purple-top PDI wipes. RN 6 put them in the bottom drawer of the medication cart.
Five minutes later, he walked over to check Resident G's blood sugar. He did not take the wipes with him. He did not clean the monitor before using it on the second resident.
When he returned to the cart, he pulled out a wipe and rubbed it across the glucometer monitor for approximately 20 seconds with an ungloved hand, then threw it away and left the machine sitting on top of the cart.
The problem with 20 seconds is printed on the side of the tub he was holding. The PDI wipes carry a single, unambiguous instruction: allow the surface to remain wet for one full minute. That contact time is not a suggestion. It is the interval the disinfectant requires to kill the pathogens it is designed to kill. Twenty seconds is one-third of that.
The glucometer in question was an Even Care machine made by Medline. Medline's own guidance calls for cleaning and disinfecting with EPA-registered disinfecting wipes. Whether the PDI wipes met that specification was not resolved in the inspection report. What is clear is that even those wipes, whatever their EPA status, were not used correctly.
The facility's own Blood Glucose Monitoring policy, which the Director of Nursing provided to inspectors the following afternoon, spells out what is required when a monitor is shared between residents. Staff must clean and disinfect the machine according to the manufacturer's directions using a product effective against HIV, hepatitis B, and hepatitis C. The policy specifically warns that 70 percent ethanol solutions, the kind found in standard alcohol prep pads, are not effective against viral bloodborne pathogens. Staff must wear gloves before cleaning, then remove the gloves and wash their hands after.
RN 6 used no gloves. He used an alcohol prep pad on the first resident. He skipped cleaning entirely before the second resident. And when he finally used the correct wipes, he stopped at 20 seconds.
The inspection cited the violation as causing minimal harm or the potential for actual harm, and noted that few residents were affected. That framing reflects the regulatory scale used to classify findings, not a medical determination that no transmission occurred. Blood glucose monitoring involves lancets and blood. A shared monitor used without adequate disinfection between patients is a recognized vector for bloodborne pathogen transmission, a risk serious enough that the CDC has investigated nursing home outbreaks linked to exactly this failure.
The Director of Nursing was present that evening. She delivered the correct wipes to the nurse at 8:10 p.m. Fifteen minutes later, when RN 6 walked to Resident G's room without them, she was somewhere in the building.
The inspection was conducted in response to a complaint. It covered one glucometer. Inspectors observed one nurse, on one shift, over the course of roughly 30 minutes. What they found in that window was a nurse who did not have the right supplies, received them, and then did not use them, twice, in a row, while a supervisor was present.
Resident B and Resident G had their blood sugar checked with the same machine on the same night. Whether either of them knows that is not recorded in the report.
Full Inspection Report
The details above represent a summary of key findings. View the complete inspection report for Brownsburg Health Care Center from 2026-05-27 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: August 11, 2026 · Our methodology
BROWNSBURG HEALTH CARE CENTER in BROWNSBURG, IN was cited for violations during a health inspection on May 27, 2026.
The sequence of events began on the evening of May 26.
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.