Tuesday October 20, 2015 Falls (Slip and Fall)

This is a favorite story.  I related it the other night at a party. (As seen on CCTV)

A woman was in a big box store shopping with her young child in the cart. She stopped in the middle of the aisle to look at something. She pulled the cart off to one side as many of us do.  This left her small child within reach of a number of bottled hair care products.  The child proceeded to grab one and squeeze it all over the floor while his mother was not looking. The mother and child then went off. I like to think to inform an employee of what had just happened but we don't know. Within a minute- another customer walked by the same aisle, looked down the aisle and saw the spill. He then strode down the side of the aisle without the spill, disappeared off camera momentarily, came back and purposefully walked through the spill. He fell. He attempted to sue the big box store.

The point of this story is that sometimes falls happen, and sometimes the person falling creates a situation where common sense and safety sense seem to have evaporated.

The above story took place in public, but the same thing can happen in a nursing home.  In the nursing home, it is more likely that the person tripped over their own two feet, failed to watch where they were going, or dropped something, and bent to pick it up.

When accidental falls happen in the nursing home, the best way to prove them to be accidental falls short of the CCTV (which is now somewhat available in Illinois), is a consistent story.  This comes from clients who are alert and oriented x3, and when the client and the staff have a consistent story that fails to change when the client moves from the nursing home to the hospital, and from one caregiver to the next.  The thing is that falls happen. Not all falls can be prevented, and sometimes, clients just slip and fall.

In Illinois, cameras are going to go a long way for nursing homes, and for families, in demonstrating what happens. The camera observes what happened before and after the fall. It can see things, like a person looking at a spill, walking by it, and coming back to see a spill. I am watching for with eager anticipation the first court case with these cameras, and how it plays out.  In the mean time, a nurse can help determine if a fall was truly accidental, or if the fall was consistent with negligence and poor safety behavior on the part of the nursing home.