Nursing Home Injury Lawyers – Helping Clients After Abuse and Neglect

Nursing homes are responsible for numerous injuries and deaths every year through abuse, neglect, and negligence. We seek justice, accountability, and full compensation on behalf of our clients and their families.  We accept nursing home abuse and neglect cases on a contingency fee, and we offer a free, no-obligation consultation.

Our firm has been significantly focused on nursing home, long-term care facility, and senior care injuries and deaths due to negligence and abuse for many years.  Since our foundation in 1969, we have had a long history of successfully helping those injured, and the families who have lost a loved one, recover full and fair compensation.

Nursing Home Negligence and Neglect

If you have a loved one in a nursing home or a long-term care facility, it’s important to understand how injuries commonly occur.  

Injuries Resulting from Inadequate or Not Properly Implemented Care Plans

Although nursing home residents are sometimes injured due to conditions like slippery floors, many injuries and deaths result from systemic failures in how nursing homes care for residents.

At the outset, residents must be assessed on a variety of criteria so that their health conditions are fully known.  Such assessment can include cognitive assessments to determine mental acuity, as well as physical assessments to determine a resident’s ability to do things like walk unattended or chew and swallow food.

When these assessments are completed, a care plan must be developed which should address the level of care required for the resident.  The care plan might prohibit the resident from being allowed to walk unattended, or it might require that the resident’s diet be restricted to only soft food.

Thereafter, the plan must be fully implemented.  Tragically, injuries and death can occur when the plans developed are not properly implemented, and the resident suffers a fall or chocking incident, for example, as a result of this failure.

Thereafter, residents must be periodically re-assessed to determine whether further care plan modifications should be made, or whether new restrictions should be implemented.  Nursing homes and long-term care facilities can be negligent in this respect, as they may not take into account a resident’s decline in health and the need for a new, higher level of care.

As a result of inadequate or improperly implemented care plans, common injuries due to nursing home negligence include:

• Choking
• Bed sores / pressure sores
• Falls
• Injuries from wandering from the facility
• Medication errors
• Contracture
• Bed rail suffocation

Negligence Through Hiring, Inadequate Supervision, and Other Matters

In addition to not having adequate care plans in place, nursing home injuries often occur because of inadequate staffing or a poorly trained staff.

Nursing homes must care for residents on a 24/7 basis, which means that they must have a sufficient number of properly trained staff available.  Staff must not only care directly for residents, but must also ensure that they are safe.  They cannot, for instance, leave entrances unattended so that cognitively-impaired residents can wander from the facility, nor can they stop providing the level of care that each resident needs.

Nursing Home Abuse 

It is frightening when we hear the horror stories of abuse to elderly nursing home residents.  Abuse can take many forms, including:

• Verbal abuse
• Physical abuse through slapping, punching, or other physical means
• Sexual abuse
• Abuse through improper restraint, which can be done by physical means or chemical means (such as intentional over-sedation)

Shockingly, a new form of elder abuse has developed – degrading residents through showing images of them in awkward positions on social media.

Regardless of the type of abuse perpetrated, such actions are both inhumane and intolerable.  You can trust that we will go the full distance in vigorously seeking punitive damages and full compensation when these incidents occur.

If Your Loved One Has Been Injured or Abused in a Long-Term Care Facility, Please Call Us.