Video: Avoiding a brain injury during a hospitalization

Video transcript:

Hi, I'm Robert Painter. Today I want to talk to you about brain injuries, and one specific tip on how you can avoid brain injuries during a hospitalization.

There are a lot of ways we can injure our heads or experience a brain injury. It could be in a football game - getting a concussion. I've had clients who have fallen off horses. But something that I've seen happen with an increasing frequency over the last few years would be people who are patients in a hospital doing fine recovering, but they end up having a brain injury because of the nursing and doctor care.

I want to tell you one specific way that you can help avoid that.

Doctors and nurses have to take care of a lot of patients in the hospital, and they don't know all of them. And in particular, they don't know their specific baseline for how they normally behave. But one of the things we know, as family members and friends, is we know how our loved ones behave. When they're in the hospital, we can perceive much more quickly when there are subtle changes in our loved ones behavior. Those changes need to be communicated to the nurse, so the nurse can make sure the doctor gets in to evaluate them immediately.

This is so important. Study after study has shown that a change in mental status (that just means a change in the way a patient is behaving - that could be just that they're behaving a little weird) could be the earliest indicator of a problem that could lead to neurological compromise or a brain injury. And, when you're dealing with a brain injury, time is so utterly important.

What I recommend is that if you have a loved one in the hospital, make sure that someone who knows them well is with them 24/7, and watching them. If there are even subtle changes that are uncharacteristic for that persons personality, make sure that you inform the nursing staff so the nurse can tell the doctor. Then the doctor can get in and figure out what's going on.

This could literally be life and death. It could save someone's brain from a permanent injury.

If you've had an experience with a brain injury during a hospitalization, you need to speak with an attorney who handles medical malpractice cases. Under Texas law, and many other states, it's a real mine field to navigate these cases. You need to get someone who's experienced.

We here at Painter Law Firm handle a lot of such cases. You can reach us at 281-580-8800, or www.painterfirm.com.