Rehabilitation facilities exist to help people recover from injuries or illnesses. Procedures for staff in rehab facilities are built on fundamentals: monitoring a resident’s skin, managing their nutrition, and maintaining the equipment they depend on. When those fundamentals are neglected, recovery does not happen. Instead, a resident can decline in ways that are painful, dangerous, and almost entirely preventable.
Specifically for patients with limited mobility, it is of the utmost importance for caregivers to follow a physician’s orders for repositioning to prevent pressure ulcers. The goal of a rehabilitation facility is to maximize independence while adhering to safety limits.
Our client was placed in a rehabilitation home, where she was severely neglected. Staff failed to perform basic procedures and neglected to adhere to her care plan. She lost weight and became malnourished. She developed multiple pressure ulcers due to a lack of turning and repositioning. Infection set in and progressed to sepsis, and she went into acute renal failure.
None of this reflected an unavoidable turn in her health. It reflected ongoing lapses in the most basic elements of her care, and it left her with preventable injuries, significant physical pain, and emotional and financial hardship.
The Townsley Law Firm represented her and recovered a settlement of over $700,000.
The Fundamentals That Were Neglected
Our client was admitted into a rehabilitation facility while her husband, and primary caretaker, was undergoing surgery. For 20 years, her husband took care of her after she had a stroke and was unable to use the left side of her body.
Upon admission into the facility and in the months after discharge, our client’s health rapidly deteriorated. Three basic responsibilities were dropped, and each one led to identifiable harm.
Skin monitoring. A resident with limited mobility must have her skin checked regularly and be repositioned to relieve pressure, because constant pressure on the same areas cuts off blood flow and causes the skin and underlying tissue to break down. This is how pressure ulcers form, and it is why prevention is a core duty in any rehabilitation or long-term care setting. When skin is not monitored and residents are not repositioned, pressure ulcers develop, and once open, they become gateways for infection. Our client developed multiple pressure ulcers.
Nutrition and the PEG tube. A PEG tube delivers nutrition directly into the stomach for patients who cannot eat normally. Managing it properly is essential, because it is the resident’s source of nourishment. When a feeding tube is not properly monitored and maintained, a resident can be left undernourished. Our client lost weight and became malnourished, which not only weakened her physically but also impaired her body’s ability to heal the very wounds that were forming.
Each of these is a fundamental, expected part of care. Together, their failure set the stage for what came next.
From Neglect to Sepsis and Kidney Failure
Pressure ulcers are not just wounds. They are open sites where bacteria can enter the body. In a malnourished patient whose ability to heal and fight infection is already compromised, an infected pressure ulcer is especially dangerous.
That is the path this case followed. The infection that took hold progressed to sepsis, the body’s extreme and self-damaging response to infection, which can cause blood pressure to fall and organs to fail. As sepsis advanced, our client developed acute renal failure, a sudden loss of kidney function that is one of the serious organ complications sepsis can cause.
The progression from neglected skin and nutrition to pressure ulcers to sepsis to organ failure is a recognized and preventable chain. Each link could have been interrupted by the basic monitoring that was supposed to be happening all along. It was not, and our client paid the price for it.
