Case Closed, Episode 6: Help That Never Came

My name is Thomas L. Gallivan, I’m an attorney here at Duffy & Duffy. I handle mostly nursing home neglect and abuse type cases.

The case I’m going to tell you about involved an 87 year-old woman who was at a nursing facility for rehabilitation after she had been hospitalized for respiratory issues. Unfortunately, the day before she was due to be discharged from the rehab facility to go home, she suffered a fall. And the reason for the fall was that they had told her not to get out of bed on her own to use the bathroom. They told her to use the call bell. And this often happens in nursing homes or rehabilitation centers. She rung the call bell once, twice, three times. She said she waited 20 to 30 minutes. No one came to help her to the bathroom. And so she made the decision that she had to try and get up on her own. On her way to the bathroom, she fell, broke her hip, and ended up needing surgery.

So what we had to prove was that they would provide, what they’re required to do, is provide an appropriate level of supervision. What she was doing was essentially following their directions. She was trying to do what they told her to do. It turns out that the facility was short of staff and no one could get there in time. So proving that was a little bit challenging, because we needed to get documentation from the facility that indicated how many nurses, how many aides were working at that time on the floor. It turned out that a number of the aides were taking their breaks at that time and that no one responded from the nurses station when she rang the bell. Luckily she was able to relay that information to us. So we knew where to go in discovery to get all those documents.

But really what turned the tide in the case was, in nursing home charts, there’s documentation of when each resident is supposed to be checked on. And it turns out that they had a lot of that documentation. But, after she was discharged -after she fell and went to the hospital- they continued to document that they were checking on her for shifts and days after.

Obviously it makes us feel good to to be able to help clients. That’s what that’s why we do this type of work. What [amount of money] we were able to recover in this case was confidential, but it was significantly more than the nursing home wanted to pay. They started out significantly lower than we were able to obtain. But I think that the most important part for this specific case was that we were able to provide her quickly with funds to help her get the assistance she needed at home.