FDA: Regulate Nursing Home Injuries and Deaths!
- by: Care2.com
- recipient: The Food and Drug Administration
Family members expect bed rails to protect the parents, grandparents, and great grandparents spending their nights in nursing home beds.
Warning labels are not placed on the bed rails that have strangled and injured senior citizens for years.
The FDA finally issued a warning in 1995 about the dangers of bed rails.You've heard about that, right? Exactly. No one has. And so the deaths and injuries continued.
After the FDA's ineffective warning, officials discussed placing warning labels on bed rails. But, manufacturers resisted, so the FDA let it slide.
Between 2003 and 2012, 36,000 mostly older adults entered emergency rooms with bed rail-related injuries. Since the FDA's quiet warning, about 550 bed rail-related deaths have occurred.
Why should senior citizens get the short end of the stick on this under-publicized and under-regulated safety issue?
Tell the FDA: Put this safety issue to bed by finally requiring warning labels on bed rails!
Shoving the issue of bed rail safety labeling under the rug won't hide the needless deaths and injuries that vulnerable senior citizens face. Putting a warning label on a product that needs it, however, will save lives.
Many people harmed or killed by bed rails suffer from dementia and other illnesses that leave them fragile. They are in nursing homes because they can no longer care for themselves, and putting an unlabeled obstacle right next to where they sleep should not be the industry standard.
[Your comment will be added here.]
Hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries have occurred--many of them after the warning you issued long ago in 1995. Don't cave in to manufacturers who don't want the extra hassle of label production when consumers deserve a safety warning, and have for over 15 years.
Require a warning label on the bed rails that injure and kill senior citizens!
Sincerely,
[Your name here]
