The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), which a couple of years ago said it would be taking a harder look at bed rail safety after reports of hundreds of deaths over the prior decades, has just recalled more than 100,000 portable bed handles after reports of the deaths of an additional three women. Our Houston bed rail injury attorneys note that Bed Handles of Blue Springs, Missouri manufactured the bed rails subject to the CPSC recall.
The portable bed handles, designed to help older adults and people with some disabilities get in and out of their beds more easily, were linked to the deaths of a 41-year-old disabled woman, an 81-year-old woman, and a woman whose age was not provided. All three women reportedly died after they became trapped between their mattresses and the bed rails.
The bed rails are widely used in nursing homes and in elder care facilities as well as for home health care. The CPSC warned that these bed handles might shift if they are attached to a bed without the use of the safety retention straps, which creates a dangerous gap between the mattress and the guardrail. The gap could cause a patient to be strangled or crushed. Medical equipment stores, drug stores, home health care stores, and health and home care catalogs sold the devices for approximately $100 between January 1994 and December 2007. (Ron Nixon, nytimes.com, 5/20/14)
The CPSC’s acting chairman has announced a program that the agency intends to use to protect older adults from consumer products that pose dangerous risks to their health, safety, and lives. We hope the program will provide strong safety guidance and is not simply cosmetic. The Houston bed rail injury attorneys at Denena Points, PC had previously written about the reluctance of federal agencies to mandate bed rail safety standards even though thousands of injuries and hundreds of deaths had been linked to the devices.
Specifically, 36,000 adults required emergency room treatment between 2003 and June 2012 because of bed rail injuries. During that same timeframe, 150 people died of their injuries from portable bed handles. Since 1995, around 500 deaths have been reported from the devices. But the CPSC and the FDA point out that the problem is likely underreported because the cause of injury or death won’t necessarily mention the bed rail. It might simply list crushing injuries, entrapment or suffocation against the mattress, or strangulation.
Even now, the CPSC, FDA, and medical device manufacturers are focusing on voluntary safety standards for bed rail systems. Voluntary standards recognize that manufacturers have a strong incentive to comply in order to avoid costly liabilities from injuries or deaths. But personal injury and wrongful death claims against the makers of defective products can be difficult and complex to prove. So voluntary safety standards do not always function as well as we would like. The value of these standards is dependent upon the quality of the standards themselves and also upon manufacturers’ willingness to follow them. And there always seems to be at least one that wants to cut corners.
Voluntary safety standards govern much of the equipment design, manufacture, and installation for the amusement park industry for instance. Six Flags in Arlington, Texas had reportedly opted not to install seat belts proffered by the manufacturer for the Texas Giant roller coaster. And then a woman experienced a 70-foot fatal fall from the roller coaster last summer. But disputes between Six Flags and the manufacturer were ongoing in this case, and it still is not crystal clear what went wrong.
Our Houston bed rail injury attorneys recognize that government-mandated safety standards might add more than voluntary standards to bed handle manufacturing costs as well as to enforcement costs. But failure of manufacturers and installers to observe all applicable voluntary safety standards could burden victims and their families with even greater costs from needless injuries and wrongful deaths. It’s always a question of whom will bear the ultimate costs, isn’t it?
Click the link to read about the CPSC investigation of bed rail safety.