A nursing home’s primary responsibility is the safety and health of their residents. One safety risk faced by up to 75% of nursing home residents is the threat of choking. A significant portion of all nursing home deaths in the United States result from choking incidents, making it one of the most common causes of death.
These incidents are serious but can often go unnoticed by nursing home staff, with tragic results. However, choking deaths are a preventable risk when the nursing home is managed properly.
Understanding how and why choking occurs in nursing homes can be lifesaving information for you or a loved one. In this guide, you’ll learn a nursing home’s responsibility when it comes to choking, and you can read here: Why Is Choking More Common in Elderly Care Homes, and signs to look out for when someone is choking.
Nursing Homes’ Responsibilities to Prevent Choking
Nursing home staff are entrusted with the care of some of our country’s most vulnerable population. Therefore, they play a critical role in and responsibility for preventing choking for the people in their care. This responsibility includes:
- Regular checkups and creating tailored care plans for each resident
- Ensuring residents are fully upright while eating
- Providing food cut into sufficiently small pieces
- Giving residents enough time to adequately chew and swallow
- Keeping residents fully upright while eating
- Making sure administered pills are not too large to swallow
- Maintaining health oral hygiene
Nursing home administrators carry the responsibility for making sure these responsibilities are being fulfilled by hiring enough qualified caregivers, installing monitoring systems, and creating and enforcing choking protocols.
Why Is Choking More Common in Elderly Care Homes?
Choking is more common in elderly care homes due to age-related degenerating abilities to swallow. Choking becomes more common as people lose muscle mass and strength in their jaws and necks, affecting their ability to chew and swallow. Dry mouth is another condition caused by aging and can make it much harder for people to fully chew or swallow food.
There are several medical conditions that increase the chance of choking. Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and GERD make swallowing harder and make choking more likely.
Signs of Choking
Acting quickly when someone is choking is often the difference between life and death. Therefore, all nursing home staff should be able to identify signs that someone’s airway is blocked. Staff should constantly be looking for people with strained breathing, grabbing their throats with their hands, inability to talk, a shocked look on their face, a weak cough, loss of color in their lips or face, their lips turning blue, or loss of consciousness.
The nursing home administrator and senior staff bear the responsibility for training caregivers to recognize these signs and react appropriately and quickly.
If your loved one has been hurt or killed during a choking incident in a nursing home, there are steps you can take to hold the nursing home accountable. There are lawyers who specialize in nursing home and choking injuries who can work to determine who is responsible and get you the justice and compensation you deserve.
