Profitable business opportunities.
According to a large malpractice firm in a blog published today (May 10, 2019), that’s how lawyers view falls in nursing homes.
Their primary target? Nursing homes who still have no effective strategy for eradicating falls from their facilities.
Nearly 70% of nursing home falls occur to residents when they are alone in their rooms. Thus, any solution should be one in which nursing homes invest in a culture that allows for their caregivers to be more visible to their residents at these vulnerable periods in order to identify and meet mobility needs.
But instead, so many nursing homes persist in promoting simple and ineffective approaches that are essentially fairy tales – like Tai Chi, exercise, and vitamin D. They use happy images like the one below – models posing as vibrant, active, and relatively young seniors.
But there’s a problem with this fantasy – residents like those in the picture above are NOT the residents who fall!
The residents who fall have an average of at least 8 chronic diseases (with some having many more), take an assortment of at least 7 or more different medications, have at least some cognitive impairment with many having severe dementia, and are at various stages in their recovery from an acute illness. And most cannot bathe, eat, dress, safely transfer from one chair to another, or use the toilet without assistance from a caregiver.
As long as nursing homes persist in offering fairy tale “solutions” to falls, their residents will be denied effective fall interventions. And they will continue to be fodder for opportunistic malpractice attorneys until they implement a culture of adequate staffing and workflow management that meets the mobility needs of residents when they are alone in their rooms.
<< Back to Blog Home
Latest Posts
