A nurse fails to put a patient with limited mobility and an unsteady gait on fall precautions. This is an example of what type of tort?

• A. Unintentional Tort
• B. Intentional Tort
• C. Quasi-intentional Tort
• D. Tortoise

Answer: (A)

The key idea is how torts are categorized by intent. An unintentional tort covers harm that results from negligence or a failure to meet the standard of care, not from a deliberate attempt to cause harm. In this scenario, the nurse did not implement fall precautions for a patient with high fall risk, which is a breach of the expected safety standard. That omission can lead to harm, but there was no intention to injure the patient, so it fits negligence—an unintentional tort.

It’s not an intentional tort, because there’s no purposeful action to harm. It isn’t a quasi-intentional tort, which involves certain patient rights issues like invasion of privacy or defamation, not safety omissions. And the option about a tortoise isn’t a real category. In nursing practice, failing to provide required fall precautions is a classic example of negligence, an unintentional tort, tied to the duty to protect patients from foreseeable harm.