Your Guide to Nursing Home Abuse & Prevention
Millions of elderly adults live in nursing home facilities.
Every one of them deserves to feel safe, protected, and respected.
Millions of elderly adults live in nursing home facilities.
Every one of them deserves to feel safe, protected, and respected.
A big concern as we age is the ease of mobility. This is one of the primary reasons why nursing homes will often perform fall risk assessments on new residents.
A positive assessment helps staff to better understand that they can give that person more independence in navigating their facility and taking care of themselves. Less than positive results, however, can indicate that they need more attentive care from their employees to handle everyday activities like navigating to the dining room, going to the bathroom, getting dressed, etc.
Two concerns that often go together are falls and broken bones. The connection between falls and fractures in nursing homes is particularly concerning.
Below, we’ll discuss which residents are most prone to falls and why and also highlight the broken bones they most commonly break when they fall. We’ll wrap this piece up by also sharing how to prevent falls in nursing homes.
As you might suspect, certain individuals living in assisted living facilities like these are more vulnerable to suffering falls than others. Those most at risk include:
As you can tell, residents afflicted with a wide range of conditions may be at particularly high risk for falls in these facilities.
Above, we mentioned fall risk assessments. If the nursing home staff fails to perform these assessments or performs them but doesn’t keep a resident’s results in mind, this may lead them to assume that individual is far more independent than they actually are.
As a result, they may think residents can move about and do things, even when it’s not safe for them to do so.
Aside from that, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cites some of the following factors as giving way to falls in general, which we’ve added to other issues that more often plague assisted living facilities:
We can certainly go on and on with listing the causes of nursing home falls. However, we think that the examples above give you an idea about factors contributing to these accidents and how some may be preventable with a little more effort on behalf of a resident or their caregivers.
Fractures are one of the most common injuries that occur that stem from falls.
Some of the following body parts are more prone to break than others when these types of injury incidents occur:
As referenced above, falls that occur in nursing care facilities are largely preventable. Ways to minimize the chances of them occurring include:
Falls and fractures in nursing homes are largely preventable, but it takes knowing why they occur and someone taking the initiative to implement the prevention approaches described above (and others) to stave them off.
This website was created and is maintained by the legal team at Thomas Law Offices. Our attorneys are experienced in a wide variety of nursing home abuse and neglect cases and represent clients on a nationwide level. Call us or fill out the form to the right to tell us about your potential case. We will get back to you as quickly as possible.
866-351-2504