A broken hip in a nursing home is two events: the fracture, and the fall that a fall-risk-assessed, care-planned resident wasn’t protected from. The medicine makes it urgent — hip fractures in elders carry serious mortality and permanent-decline risks that CDC data documents bluntly — and the records make it provable.
- The assessment trail: residents are scored for fall risk at admission; high scores demand interventions — the gap between assessed risk and implemented precautions is the case.
- The usual failures: unanswered call bells, missing supervision during transfers, absent alarms and mats, medication regimens that guaranteed dizziness — the facility-fall patterns.
- The aftermath: surgery in a fragile patient, hardware, immobility’s cascade (sores, pneumonia, decline) — damages that must be valued as the life-altering event this is.
Incident reports, staffing schedules, and call-bell logs answer how it happened; Medicare’s facility record answers whether it was a pattern. Our nursing home practice builds these cases with the seriousness elder fractures deserve — including wrongful death claims where the cascade proved fatal.
Frequently Asked Questions
The facility calls it ‘an unwitnessed fall.’ What does that really mean?
Often: no one was watching a resident whose care plan required watching. Unwitnessed is not unexplained — the surrounding records still tell the story.
Mom survived surgery but never walked again. What’s claimable?
The full decline — surgery, care-level increase, lost independence, and its costs — not merely the fracture. Elder-fracture damages are life-trajectory damages.
Should we move her before pursuing anything?
Safety first, always — and moving doesn’t weaken the claim; the records of the fall period are preserved and obtainable regardless.
Concerned about the care you or a family member received? Call (215) 464-4600 or contact us online — free, confidential, records-first evaluations.