Nursing Home Wandering Off & Elopement

Some residents may be forgetful and will walk aimlessly around the facility. A nursing home should monitor these people to make sure they are not a danger to themselves or others.

Wandering off (also called elopement) is a recurring issue for nursing homes. Patients with limited strength or with dementia wander off the premises. Because it is a frequent issue, nursing homes should be prepared to prevent wandering off and elopement. When a loved one suffers serious injury or wrongful death from wandering off, contact a nursing home neglect lawyer at NST.

Nursing homes should have systems and training in place to deal with elopement. Without careful monitoring, a patient can walk out the door and into the desert heat or into traffic. Or the patient could get confused and lost. At NST nursing home neglect law firm, we have handled cases in which wandering off resulted in serious injury and wrongful death.

• Inadequate staffing: A major cause of elopement is the failure to hire enough staff to properly supervise residents.
• Inadequate training: Was the staff properly trained in how to supervise residents to prevent wandering off?
• Failure to provide - and use - alarms: The nursing home needs to have and use alarms to indicate when doors open. When staff members prop open doors and leave them unmonitored, having an alarm doesn't help.
• Failure to identify risks: If a patient is a wandering risk, the staff should be aware of that and take special care to monitor the resident's movements.
• Failure to notify: When a resident wanders off, the appropriate family member should be notified.