My mother in law recently passed away in a nursing home, death certificate states due to fall at nursing home. Mother in law has suffered from dimentia for past 7 years, we received phone call from nursing home saying that she had fallen and was going to take her for scan. Took her in to hospital and was found to be bleeding on the brain, was stated that nothing could be done to help her. 4 days later she passed.

Is there any recourse against nursing home for the fall that she took. She had a history of falling, seems like that nursing home could have watched or prevented this last fall.

Nursing homes have a duty to assess a patient, utilizing a federally mandated “MDS” or Minimum Data Set. That MDS in turn generates RAPS or “Resident Assessment Protocol Scores”. Those are in turn used to develop the care plan, or road map of the patient’s care. The nursing home should properly care plan for a fall risk, and if the nursing home assesses someone as a fall risk, it must do many things to ensure that it minimizes all risks of falls. These are basically accomplished by using either sufficient staffing or a combination of staffing and assistive devices.

If your mother had a history of falls, then the nursing home would have been on notice she was a fall risk. If the nursing home failed to prevent the fall, and did not use all reasonable measures, there is a very good argument that the nursing home was negligent, or even grossly negligent in that regard. This summer alone, I have resolved multiple nursing home cases into the six figures based on falls.

The nursing home will often not have much information regarding the circumstances of the fall contained in the medical record. The nursing home will often have incident reports outlining what happened. Recently, I resolved a case where the nursing home’s records simply indicated an “injury of unknown origin.” It turned out a resident fell as a result of using improper assistive devices, and the nursing home had fired three staff members over it.

Nursing homes receive federal money, for the most part, and as a result are subject to inspection via the Department of Health and Human Services. Typically DHS assigns this to CMS, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Then, CMS assigns it to state agencies. The state agencies have the ability to inspect the nursing homes, and if they find deficiencies, the nursing homes are required to submit plans of correction. The state agencies can even place the nursing homes on “immediate jeopardy” status, and this can result in the threat of losing their licenses.

If a nursing home is in such a state, it unfortunately may attempt to cover up, rather than report an injury such as the fall scenario described above. Typically, a nursing home would have to report this incident. You can review factual information about the nursing home by going to www.medicare.gov and searching nursing home compare.

We handle nursing home cases as a large part of our practice, and I used to defend nursing homes. Check our website atwww.nursinghomeattorneysc.com