Without a doubt, one of the most frustrating aspects of litigating cases involving nursing home injuries is that many of them derive from the failure of staff to implement the most common sense safeguards.
Unlike situations where a facility may be negligent providing poor medical care for a patient (which is plenty disturbing), the emergence of cases involving reckless carelessness is something that I am beginning to see with more frequency as facilities look to stock their facilities with the least qualified staff— at the lowest concentrations.
I was again reminded that the real tragedy associated with this uptick in poor oversight is the harm imposed on patients living at these facilities— who are very much reliant upon staff to provide them with their care– when I read about a recent incident at a New York nursing home in Queens.
According to news reports, a patient at the Margaret Tietz Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Queens fell to their death when they accessed an unsecured staircase in their wheelchair. The facility has initiated an investigation into the matter to determine why the door to stairway was left unlocked when it was supposed to be accessible only by a pass-code.
While this incident obviously deserves to be investigated an evaluated to the fullest extent possible, I suggest that the operator of this facility take a step back and look at the quality of the people they have working at their facility and realistically assess why no one corrected this obvious error before a patient was killed.
Related Nursing Homes Abuse Blog Entries:
Nursing Home’s Failure To Implement Fall Precautions Results In Death Of Patient
Another Example Of Nursing Home Negligence: Disabled Patient Falls Down Unsecured Stairway
Fall Leaves Veteran With Broken Neck In Illinois Nursing Home