Nursing Home Negligence in Oklahoma: What Legal Options are There?

Nursing homes are a necessary haven for many ill and elderly Oklahoma citizens with injuries.  These patients deserve a high level of care that they often don’t receive resulting in nursing home negligence.  Many nursing home residents must use wheelchairs on a daily basis in order to move about the nursing home.  Therefore, it is imperative that nursing home staff are always paying attention and assisting those residents so they get from point A to point B.

Nursing Home Abuse:

In Oklahoma, nursing home staff must provide a certain level of assistance to patients who are getting in and out of their wheelchairs.  This is often referred to as “stand-by assist”.  Patients who must use wheelchairs to move among the nursing home typically are not capable of getting up and down or in and out of the wheelchair.  They need the assistance of nursing home staff.  These people need continuous and around-the-clock care in order to properly function on an everyday basis. Without this help you may be a victim of nursing home negligence.

All too often, patients suffer neglect and must fend for themselves.  Many nursing homes have too few employees.  This leads to many patients taking it upon themselves to get in and out of bed without help.  For example, a patient who is staying in a nursing home to recover from having hip replacement surgery needs the assistance of a nursing home staff member in order to get to the bathroom, or to get a box of tissues from across the room.  If this person has no help, he or she is more likely fall and injure him or herself even worse.

Nursing Home Abuse Can Be Life Threatening:

The feeling of helplessness can be unbearable for many people.  Especially those that need wheelchairs in order to get through their daily lives.  When nursing home staff are not available to offer stand-by assistance to those patients with wheelchairs, they are essentially neglecting those patients.  They open the door to those patients taking matters into their own hands.  Instead of a nurse helping a patient get up and out of a wheelchair, that patient will simply try to stand up and try his or her best to grab that tissue or to make it to the bathroom.

Studies indicate that 1 in 3 Nursing home patients are victims of neglect. These are Oklahoman residents that simply don’t deserve to be in isolation.  Reform is needed in the nursing home industry to end nursing home negligence.  But it is unfortunately coming at a slow pace.  Great changes are being made to educate nursing home staff and create standard procedures ensuring patient safety.  However, too many accidents are happening, too many patients being neglected, and too many patients are falling out of wheelchairs.  Many patients are not able to speak for themselves.  Further, if they do speak, they may not receive help.  The term “nursing home” should be precisely what it intends to be – a place to “nurse” one back to health.  Patients cannot be “nursed” back to health until the proper standard of nursing home care is being following.

Nursing Home Negligence Attorneys in Your Corner:

If you or a loved one has suffered an injury as a result of nursing home negligence we want to help you. Each year Oklahoma nursing homes hurt or injure family members. From bed sores to broken bones we can help you.

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