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Hiring a Lawyer Who Asks the Right Questions About Nursing Home Falls Can Make All the Difference

The main reason that families admit a loved one to a nursing home is to keep them safe. It is well-recognized in the nursing home industry that falls are a major safety concern. It is part of the job of the nursing home staff to prevent falls and the serious injuries that result from them.

When a nursing home resident is injured in a fall, it often has devastating consequences. Many senior citizens suffer from osteoporosis, or brittle bone disease, which leaves them at risk for suffering serious injuries, especially hip fractures. Making matters worse, there are many studies which show that hip fractures and associated complications of hip fractures are a major cause of death and major disability to senior citizens. Many never walk again, if they survive the fall and the subsequent medical care. When families learn that their mother or father was hurt in a fall, one common question that they have is whether the nursing home has some liability.
When you make a decision to hire a lawyer, you need to hire a lawyer who:

• Knows the right questions to ask; and
• Knows where to find the answers to those questions.

Most personal injury lawyers handle "slip and fall" accidents. An important question in a slip and fall case is the cause of the fall, because if you cannot show what caused your fall, you will lose your case. However, virtually all nursing home cases are not "slip and fall" cases. Some are, such as when someone slips on spilled food in the dining room, but most are not. When you treat a nursing home fall as a "slip and fall" case, you may be told that since you cannot show what made your nursing home resident fall, there is no case. That is treating a nursing home fall like a "slip and fall," and that is a mistake.

The right questions to ask in a nursing home fall case are:

• Should this fall have been anticipated (the answer is almost always "yes"); and
• Were the proper steps taken to prevent the fall (the answer too frequently is "no").

The answers to those questions are often found in the patient's chart, in entries made days, weeks, and sometimes months before the fall happened.

When a resident enters a nursing home, a fall risk assessment is done by the nursing staff. The nursing home staff uses the results of that assessment to create an individualized care plan designed to prevent falls. It must then be communicated to the individual nurses and CNA's who care for the resident, and they must execute the care plan on a day-to-day basis. The care plan must then be reviewed regularly to make sure that it is adequate to prevent falls and then revised if needed. The development of the fall prevention care plan, its implementation, and the review of the effectiveness of the care plan is where the real issues of the legal liability of nursing homes for falls is determined.
There are five key areas of inquiry in determining the legal liability of nursing homes for falls:

1. The assessment of the resident - if the assessment does not accurately reflect the fall risks, then a proper care plan will not be put into place.
2. The adequacy of the care plan - does the care plan properly address the risk of the patient falling.
3. The implementation of the care plan - the best care plan in the world will not prevent falls unless the plan is actually being carried out on a day-to-day basis.
4. The review of the care plan -once there is a care plan in place, it must be checked to see if it is actually effective in addressing the fall risks and preventing falls.
5. The revision of the care plan - if the care plan that is currently in place is not effective at preventing falls, then it needs to be changed to include more effective and aggressive measures.

At our firm, we know the difference between a slip and fall case and a nursing home fall case. We know that the evidence of the cause of the fall may not be found in the chart entry which notes that the fall occurred, but it may be found in the chart entries the week or months before. Nursing home fall cases are complex, difficult cases, and your family needs the help of experienced nursing home lawyers who know to ask the right questions and look in the right places for answers.

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