The San Diego Union-Tribune is reporting a nursing home patient died while in the home’s care for rehab post hip surgery. The patient had fallen one time, so he was a known fall risk. The nursing home put a monitor on him which notified the staff whenever he got out of bed. The patient got out of bed (the staff did not respond to the alarm) and wandered into the hallway. He stumbled and because there were no hand rails in the hallways (a violation) he grabbed on to a heavy piece of equipment, a lift device used for lifting patients, which toppled over on him and killed him.
David’s Comments: The nursing home started out by doing the right thing when they assessed the patient as a fall risk and made him wear an alarm - an acceptable method of preventing falls in a nursing home. But that is about the extent of what they did right. Speculating, the staff not responding to the alarm is either one of two things. Either it was a “willful and wanton disregard” to respond to the alarm and therefore the nursing home can be sued for punitive damages in addition to negligence. Or, there was simply not enough staff to timely respond, meaning the nursing home was negligent by under-staffing its facility at that time. Any nursing home attorney will tell you there is almost always an under-staffing issue involved because a nursing home makes money just like any other business, by reducing its costs such as payroll.
You may also want to check out the comments section of the newspaper’s article. There are several nursing home employees who have left comments saying they even think this is negligence. Some are even savvy enough to raise the understaffing issue and how mechanical lifts should be secured away from patients.