Law Commons^™

Standards Of Medical Care Based On Consensus Rather Than Evidence: The Case Of Routine Bedrail Use For The Elderly, Howard S. Rubenstein, Frances H. Miller, Sholem Postel, Hilda B. Evans

Faculty Scholarship

“An 88-year-old male patient was found on his hands and knees on the floor beside his bed. The bedrails were up.”—From an indent report filed by a nurse at the Stillman Infirmary, University Health Services, Harvard University, in May 1980.

Finding elderly patients lying on the floor beside their beds despite the presence of elevated bedrails seems paradoxical: how can a patient fall out of bed when the bedrails are up? Surprisingly, this paradox constitutes one of the leading incidents plaguing hospitals in the United States today. It exemplifies a much larger problem created, we believe, by the uncritical adoption …