The problem is that the collective nursing staff (RNs, LPNs, CNAs, etc.) in hospitals and other medical care facilities are not attentive to patients’ needs for reasons ranging from being spread too thin among the many patients they have, to outright apathy. It is well known among medical professionals, that hospitalized or other frail patients think that they can walk without falling, when they cannot. When a patient presses the call bell for assistance in going to the bathroom, and no one answers for a half-hour, the patient does the natural thing, and tries to ambulate himself. Often, this results in a fall, especially in the elderly, with grave consequences such as a broken hip.

The Center for Medicare Services therefore added hospital falls to their list of “never events” (serious, PREVENTABLE, and costly medical errors) whereby CMS will not reimburse a hospital for care related to an injury due to a fall.
Other items on the list of “never events” include operating on the wrong site or wrong patient or performing the wrong procedure on the patient, delivering a gas other than oxygen to a patient, when oxygen was intended, burns to a patient, delivering an infant on discharge to the wrong person, etc.

The bottom line is that patient falls are indeed preventable at a small fraction of the cost than to treat the resulting patient injuries, and preventing them is the absolute duty of the medical care facility. How a care facility wants to do so is their prerogative. They can hire someone that frequently circulates among the patients to ensure that they are not getting out of bed unassisted. They can install accurate bed alarms and actually monitor those alarms. If they chose to install ultra-sensitive alarms that go off all the time, and no one responds, and a patient falls, that is their negligence, not the patient’s, and the hospital has to face the consequences. If they chose to do nothing, and a patient falls, that is their negligence and they have to face the consequences. If they chose to pray to the guardian saint of healthcare, and a patient falls, that is their negligence….

Many facilities find patients that have fallen, and put them back into bed with the injury from the fall, and fail to document anything it in the chart, and many facilities fail to report falls and other reportable injuries as part of the mandatory reporting system for a variety of reasons, including fear of losing Medicare or insurance payments.

Hospitals, in general, run sloppy ships, and the norm is not acceptable. If the hospital cannot eliminate the “preventable” events that is their fault, and they deserve not to get paid for the patient’s injuries. It therefore behooves all medical care facilities to properly address this problem.