My Mom Fell at a Nursing Home. What Can I Do?

Nursing homes should be caring hence it is in the name, although every next day we come to a news which is quite opposite to its mere nature. Headlines lines like an elderly fell from stairs and got injured. Stats clearly describe that these incidents are rising year on year, more than half of nursing home residents sustain a serious fall.

Relatives and other loved ones are well aware of the serious physical and emotional injuries that falls usually cause. Both kinds of injuries are permanent. Among older adults, broken bones and other physical injuries normally never completely heal. In fact, most elderly fall victims cannot ever live independently again. Their physical limitations are too severe. Emotionally, many of these victims become recluses. They’re so afraid of falling again that they basically become prisoners in their own houses.

A Los Angeles slip and fall attorney helps ensure that older fall victims are able to make the most out of their retirement years. Attorneys connect victims with doctors who heal their bodies, and minds, to the greatest extent possible. Additionally, lawyers obtain the financial compensation these victims need to pay fall-related expenses, like medical bills, and put their injuries behind them.

Did the Nursing Home Have a Duty of Care?

First and foremost, our nursing home fall consultations usually focus on this issue. Unless the nursing home could be legally responsible for the fall, there’s no point in determining if the nursing home was legally responsible for the fall.

When determining a property owner’s duty, many states still rely on an outdated system that classifies victims into confusing, overlapping categories that often leave people scratching their heads. Recognizing the need for change, California updated its approach by adopting a factor-based analysis. Under this modern framework, all property owners—whether they run nursing homes, grocery stores, or even private homes—are held to a clear duty of care.

The extent of that duty depends on factors such as:

• Risk of Serious Injury from Falls in Nursing Homes: As mentioned, most nursing home residents fall at least once. Also as mentioned, these falls cause serious physical and emotional injuries. Additionally, usually because of pre-existing medical conditions, older people are more at risk for a fall and more likely to sustain serious injuries.
• Assessing the Owner’s Awareness of Hazards: This evidence can be direct or circumstantial. Smoking guns include safety reports and common area cleaning reports. Judges typically use the time-notice rule to evaluate circumstantial evidence. If someone just spilled something on the floor, the owner probably didn’t know about the hazard. If the spill happened an hour earlier, that’s different.
• Owner Responsibility for Facility Safety: Nursing home owners usually have exclusive control over indoor common areas and outdoor walkways. Nursing home owners usually have partial control over individual patient rooms, especially if these rooms have locks.

Other factors include the nature and location of the property as well as the difficulty of protecting against the hazard.

Can a Los Angeles Personal Injury Attorney Prove Negligence?

Normally, attorneys rely on the police accident report and witness statements to prove negligence, or a lack of care, in injury cases. Both kinds of evidence may be unavailable, or at least not compelling, in nursing home fall cases.

Emergency responders almost never provide written reports in these situations, leaving minimal documentation. While a victim’s statements to paramedics might qualify under a rare hearsay exception, there’s no guarantee they’ll be admissible in court.

On top of that, many jurors carry an unconscious bias, assuming older adults struggle with memory or recall. This often leads them to undervalue testimony from victims or witnesses in these cases.

That said, victims can sometimes leverage a legal concept known as res ipsa loquitur. This principle allows jurors to assume negligence if the injury is the type that typically wouldn’t happen without it, and if the property owner had complete control over the area. In these cases, it creates a strong presumption that the owner’s negligence caused the fall.

Negligence almost always causes falls. Granted, many older people have pre-existing medical conditions. However, these conditions usually don’t cause these individuals to fall out of nowhere. Similarly, someone could push an older person down, but such incidents are rare.

We also touched on control issues above. Normally, if the fall happened in a common area, res ipsa loquitur is almost a given. If a resident fell in his/her room, owner negligence might be harder to prove.

Negligence is never “hard” to prove in civil court. The burden of proof is only a preponderance on the evidence (more likely than not). That legal standard practically means victim/plaintiffs get the benefit of the doubt.

Injury victims are usually entitled to substantial compensation. For a free consultation with an experienced Los Angeles personal injury lawyer, contact the Law Offices of Eslamboly Hakim. Lawyers can connect victims with doctors, even if they have no money or insurance.

Credit: Photo on Freepik