Case Story: Recovering Compensation After a Severe Brain Injury

So, one of the things that can happen with a fall in a skilled nursing facility or an RCFE is somebody can have a brain injury of some sort. What’s supposed to happen is immediately after the injury, they’re supposed to do neuro checks, make sure the person is all right. Obviously, if they’re not, they should call a hospital, they should be hospitalized, paramedics should arrive. But sometimes that doesn’t happen. One of the follow-up steps is they’re supposed to be performing neuro checks for hours afterwards just to make sure there are no long-term injuries. And again, sometimes that doesn’t happen. When that doesn’t happen, when they don’t perform those immediate neuro checks, or the neuro checks in the hours afterwards, sometimes they miss serious brain injuries and a person can have a brain bleed that can go on for days or weeks.

We’ve had a number of cases where people have these brain bleeds, the staff is unaware, and by the time they actually do become aware and they end up at the hospital, the person is either at risk of passing away, has passed away, or is going to have a serious impairment for the rest of their lives. And we’ve seen that on several occasions. We had a client who suffered a fall at an RCFE a few years back. She had a brain bleed. The facility didn’t perform neuro checks immediately and they didn’t perform neuro checks for the next 12 hours or so. About two weeks later, she was having severe issues, was taken by paramedics to the hospital. When she arrived, the surgeon immediately found that she had a brain bleed and flat out told the family that if this had been discovered weeks beforehand, they could have done something, but there was very little they could do at that point. She passed away shortly afterwards.

So it’s important understanding the steps that the nursing home or the RCFE is supposed to take. You have to understand that they’re supposed to perform these neuro checks. You need to actually speak with the nurses and the staff members who failed to do that, review the records, and find that they simply didn’t record performing neuro checks, they didn’t actually do the work they were supposed to do when they were supposed to do it. And that’s one of the differences between us. We understand both the medical side and the actual practical legal side, so we can go through the records, we understand what’s supposed to be there, and we find those holes, and then we actually depose the people involved and ask them about those holes.