Close Supervision Essential to Preventing Nursing Home Residents from Wandering

By Thomas Greer | May 6, 2014

Nursing homes are supposed to keep their residents safe, in addition to doing whatever they can to ensure that they remain healthy.  Keeping elderly adults safe can be challenging due to some of the changes that older adults experience in their later years. One change which poses a serious risk to the older adults who are affected by it is the tendency to wander.

Sometimes, problems with wandering begin when an elderly person is still living independently, in their own home. Family members may be able to overlook other, less obvious signs that an older relative is becoming unable to live independently. However, discovering that an elderly relative has wandered away from home and has gone missing for even a few hours is a dramatic turning point after which many families decide that their relative would be safer if they lived in a nursing home.

While many nursing homes are secure most of the time, there have been occasions where nursing home residents have been able to wander away from the facilities where they were living, often with tragic results. Earlier this month, a ninety six year old woman disappeared from a nursing home in the Bronx. She had been placed in the care of the nursing home a few months earlier, after she was found in a disoriented state on the subway. A resident in a memory care facility in Minnesota wandered away from the facility when the doors were not locked properly. The man died of hypothermia, as the incident happened in January while the temperature outside was five degrees, with a wind chill of eighteen degrees below zero. A nursing home resident in Florida drowned in a drainage ditch after wandering away from a nursing home. Cases like these unfortunately happen all across America, and all over the world.

Nursing homes have a duty to provide a safe environment for their residents. For residents who have certain health conditions like dementia, schizophrenia, or Alzheimer’s disease which increase the likelihood that the will wander off, a safe environment is a secure and supervised environment. The same holds true for residents whose history of wandering caused their families to entrust their care to a nursing home.

There are a few ways that nursing homes can keep residents from wandering away from their facilities. Housing residents with histories of wandering or health conditions which could cause wandering in heavily secured areas is one approach to keeping these vulnerable residents safe. Also, communication through both documentation in resident records and education of nursing home staff about residents who are prone to wandering can help to ensure close and constant supervision of those residents who need it.

If your elderly relative has developed a problem with wandering and you plan to entrust their care to a nursing home, be sure to carefully examine the physical security and security policies of each nursing home that you visit before you choose a home for your relative. Also, be sure to speak with the nursing home director about your relative’s history of wandering, because that information can help them to ensure that your relative receives the supervision that they need.

If someone that you love has been injured or killed after they wandered away from a nursing home or other facility that had been entrusted with their care, the knowledgeable Tennessee Nursing Home Abuse and Neglect Attorneys at Bailey & Greer, PLLC are here to help you. We will sit down with you to explain your options and help you decide how to proceed. Call us today, at 901-680-9777, to schedule your initial consultation.  At Bailey & Greer, PLLC, we are small enough to care, big enough to fight, and experienced enough to win.

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