Nursing Homes - Bed Sores - Sepsis
Bedsores in nursing homes are preventable. If they should occur, they should be detected and treated without delay. When the staff at a nursing home fails to do this, there’s a risk that a life-threatening infection called “sepsis” can enter the bloodstream. That’s exactly what happened to a 79 year old woman at a nursing home in California who died from untreated bedsores.
I previously wrote an article about bedsores and said that any nursing home that allows a patient to develop bedsores and fails to treat that patient should be held accountable. Well, a California jury agrees, and just last month awarded $30 million to the family of this poor woman who was also suffering from dementia. The incredible thing is that she was only in the nursing home for 7 months! In this short time, she developed bedsores which went untreated. This led to sepsis, which in a nutshell, causes inflammation to extend beyond the site of an infection, To fight the inflammation, the body forms blood clots which prevent oxygen from getting to the body’s vital organs. Lack of oxygen causes organ failure and death.
Sepsis is the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S. It is more common in the elderly, and in this population it’s very dangerous. That’s one of the reasons why there are Federal Regulations that apply to nursing homes when it comes to preventing, documenting and treating bedsores.
