Falls, pressure injuries, medication errors, and infections acquired in a hospital are preventable with basic nursing care, and a hospital injury lawyer who is a nurse knows where the chart shows the failure.

Patients enter a hospital to get better. When they leave with an injury the admission did not cause, the hospital has questions to answer. Most hospital-acquired injuries trace back to the same causes: not enough nurses on the unit, assessments that were copied forward instead of performed, and a change in the patient's condition that nobody escalated.

California Sets the Nurse Staffing Ratio, and It Matters California is the only state with mandatory nurse-to-patient ratios on every hospital unit, set by regulation (Title 22, California Code of Regulations, section 70217). A medical-surgical nurse may care for no more than five patients. When a hospital runs over ratio, falls, missed medications, and unrecognized deterioration follow. We request the unit's staffing records for the shift of the injury and compare them to the ratio. Hospitals also document every fall, pressure injury, and medication error in an internal incident system separate from the chart; getting those records is part of the case.

Cases We Handle

• Falls in the hospital, including falls from beds and in bathrooms

• Pressure injuries acquired during a stay

• Medication and dosing errors, including wrong drug and wrong patient

• Hospital-acquired infections and sepsis that went unrecognized

• Failure to monitor and failure to escalate a change in condition

• Injuries to elderly patients that may also be elder abuse under California law

• Wrongful death

What We Investigate

• Nursing assessments, fall-risk and skin-risk scores, and the care plan

• The medication administration record against the physician orders

• Vital sign trends and the time between the first warning sign and the call to the physician

• Nurse-to-patient ratios on the unit

• The hospital's incident report and its own root-cause review

Time Limits Claims against hospitals for professional negligence generally must be filed within one year of discovering the injury and no more than three years from the injury (Code of Civil Procedure section 340.5). Claims against public hospitals require a written government claim within six months (Government Code section 911.2). Elder abuse claims have their own deadlines. Call early.