Case Story: Recovering Compensation for Wheelchair Transfer Injuries

It’s not uncommon for nursing home residents to be unstable when they walk, need help with transfers either from their bed to a chair, walking to a toilet or chair back to the bed. All those situations necessitate care and assistance. It’s one of the primary jobs of a nursing home and other facilities is to provide that assistance with transferring. And so at the outset, every resident’s goal is to receive assessments so that the nursing home can find out or know exactly how much care and help they need to facilitate a particular transfer. It’s critically important that they make that assessment appropriately. And then it’s even more important that they implement the level of assistance that’s required.

Wheelchair transfers, there’s a case that comes to mind as far as an issue that happened is typically the the standard is when you’re moving someone out of or into a wheelchair, you need to lock the wheels. And a lot of times they just don’t do that. And so obviously you might expect someone’s going to reach back, touch the chair, and the chair moves out and they land on the floor instead of the chair. There’s a particular case uh that happened in where it resulted in a femur fracture. And unfortunately, when a femur fracture or a hip fracture happens to someone um beyond a certain age, their mortality rates are incredibly high because that renders you bed bound. you’re no longer able to move around like you once did and that leads to untimely death more often than not.

Transfers in general are high-risk propositions because obviously if you do that wrong, someone’s going to fall and like I just said, if someone does fall, it it leads to increased mortality rates. It’s just most of these people are there in a fragile state already. And so when you add a traumatic injury like a fracture, head injury, whatever it might be, it it does not bode well for them. If you or your loved one has suffered a fall from a transfer or as a result of a mismanaged transfer, please give us a call and we’ll do what we can to help you.