Protecting your family from falls at nursing homes. Do nurses pretend falls don't happen at nursing homes?

The two most common injuries occurring at nursing homes and resulting in lawsuits are from bedsores and falls that could have been prevented by good nursing care. Patient falls in nursing homes are a serious problem. A fall can cause extreme injury in the elderly, even death.

In fact the Centers for Disease Control reports that about 1,800 people living in nursing homes die each year from falls. The statistics demonstrate that in an average nursing home with 100 beds, there are 100 to 200 falls each year. The real number of falls is probably more because some falls go unreported. Patients often fall more than once and about 35% of injuries from falls are in nursing home residents who cannot walk.

The nurses are required by law to evaluate the risk of whether a nursing home resident will fall. Once the risk level is determined, the nurses are supposed to create a plan to prevent falls. The type of preventive interventions should be different depending on the level of risk and the person.

The single greatest indicator of whether or not a person is going to fall in the future is a history of falling. Therefore, if a patient falls in a nursing home despite preventive measures already being taken, common sense is that it is crucial to create a new preventive plan.

Unfortunately we see with amazing frequency in our Daytona Beach-based nursing home negligence practice what looks like the nurses are actually pretending that a falls do not happen. In other words a resident falls and the nurses do not reevaluate the risk of future falls and do not do anything different to prevent any more falls.

The problem of course, is that this ignores the high risk of very serious injury and even death. If somebody in your family is in a nursing home and falls, insist that the nurses explain to you what they are going to do to prevent future falls and why they think it will be effective.