Fractures and Lacerations After Nursing Home Falls at the Berkeley Nursing and Rehab Center in Oak Park, Illinois

Most nursing home inspection reports that involve nursing home falls provide carefully acquired details garnered from multiple written reports and verbal interviews.

The recent inspection at the Berkeley Nursing and Rehab Center in Oak Park, Illinois is much more to the point:

6/7/12 at 7:00AM – R6 found face down in his room attempting to go to the bathroom.
Laceration to right eyebrow.
6/9/12 – R6 fell in his room.
6/26/12 at 2:10AM – R6 found face down in his room attempting to go to the bathroom.
6/30/12 at 7:00AM – R6 found on floor in his room.
7/28/12 at 2:00AM – R6 found on floor in his room. Laceration to right elbow.
8/13/12 at 3:30AM – R6 found on floor in his room attempting to go to the bathroom. R6 complained of pain in ribs and legs.

The “pain’ in the ribs turned out to be fractured ribs.

Nursing home falls are extremely serious injuries because the initial fall is only part of the risk. Nursing home falls often leave residents incapacitated for long periods of time which makes residents more likely to develop bed sores and other infections like pneumonia. Even when a recovery is successful, bones broken at an advanced age are never as strong as they were prior to the fall, making additional injuries more likely.

Berkeley Nursing and Rehab, like every nursing home, is obligated to conduct a complete investigation whenever a nursing home fall occurs. In addition to a failure to update the resident’s plan of care to include interventions designed to prevent nursing home falls, there is evidence that the resident’s chart was falsely updated to disguise the number of nursing home falls that actually occurred.

If you have a loved one who has experienced multiple falls in an Illinois nursing home, contact our Chicago nursing home falls attorneys for a free and confidential evaluation of your case.