At the Harvey, Foote & Baker Law Firm in New Mexico, we represent numerous people who have received serious injuries as the result of nursing home abuse and neglect. We therefore realize that nursing home residents, especially elderly ones, face a high risk of sustaining a traumatic brain injury if and when they fall.
Should your parent live in a nursing home due to his or her deteriorating health, you need to know that, as reported by Academic Life in Emergency Medicine, falls represent the number one reason why your loved one could sustain a TBI, a serious head injury that causes his or her brain to violently jerk back and forth within his or her skull. Such violent motion, in turn, injures the brain’s delicate nerves and tissues, resulting in its beginning to malfunction in some manner.
Falls Among The Elderly
A study found that if your parent falls, the cause of that fall likely will be the fact that the nursing home caregivers failed to give him or her the help (s)he needed at the time (s)he needed it. Unfortunately, many nursing home residents fall when they attempt to walk to the bathroom on their own since they can wait no longer for a caregiver to respond to their call buzzer or light. If they are feeble and/or unsteady on their feet due to their age or their condition, such unassisted walking constitutes a fall just waiting to happen.
The study concluded that eldery adults are far more likely to fall than younger people, and when they do, their injuries are more severe. Statistics show that during a recent five-year period, emergency rooms nationwide treated upwards of 142,000 elderly people for traumatic brain injuries. Of these, nearly 81,500 of them had to be admitted to the hospital and 14,500 of them died from their injuries. Among those who suffered nonfatal TBIs, they exhibited longer lasting TBI symptoms than younger people with similar head injuries do, and their prognoses were considerably poorer.
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