The family’s nursing expert’s report borrowed directly from the familiar language of Federal nursing home regulations that require that a nursing home resident’s environment be as free of accident hazards as possible and that residents receive adequate supervision.  Then the expert went on to specify what that meant in this resident’s case. COURT OF APPEAL OF LOUISIANA December 6, 2017

  A ninety-four year-old nursing home resident had fallen twenty-seven times before her last fall that caused a C1 vertebral facture that led to her death three weeks later.  In her last fall she hit her head while trying to transfer herself from her wheelchair to the toilet in a restroom in a common area of the facility, even though she had been counseled not to do that.  After her fall those restrooms were locked to prevent unsupervised access by residents.  She had been on a toileting schedule, but that had been discontinued.

  The Court of Appeal of Louisiana found grounds for the family’s lawsuit in the report of a nursing expert hired by the family’s lawyers for the case.  A chair alarm was listed in her care plan but was never started. In the expert’s opinion staff would have been alerted by an alarm when she tried to get out of her wheelchair and could have intervened.  The facility’s practice was to put a star sticker on a resident’s wheelchair if the resident was a fall risk who required extra supervision.  That was not done.  Even without that all staff should have known of her fall history. Domingue v. House, __ So. 3d __, 2017 WL 6029301 (La. App., December 6, 2017).