It’s a very difficult and traumatic decision to place a loved one in a nursing home and a family member’s worst nightmare is to find out their loved one is being neglected or abused in a nursing home. Nursing home neglect and abuse cases present different challenges to attorneys than, for example, a medical malpractice case because very often in nursing home neglect cases, the victim may not be able to speak up. The nursing home resident may have suffered a stroke and have difficulty communicating or suffer from age related dementia or Alzheimer’s disease and may not have a recollection of events.
This is where our attorneys expertise comes into play – we know exactly what to look for and how to proceed quickly with an investigation.
There are many excellent nursing home facilities across the country but as with any industry/business (and make no mistake, nursing homes are very big business) there is both the good actors and the bad. When clients contact us – it’s always as the result of something bad happening to a loved one and the family wants answers about what happened.
The first thing we do is talk to the family – we schedule a family meeting to better understand the condition of the client before and after the event, we speak to the victim (if possible) and any witnesses, we review the client’s chart and any applicable hospital records and we do this faster than any other law firm. We want to investigate quickly while memories of the events are clear and we can quickly determine if this is an unavoidable accident or the result of neglect. And we can move so quickly because in addition to our highly trained and experienced attorneys and paralegals we also employ palliative care nurses who request and review all medical records and charts rather than rely on outside agency nurses for review which saves several weeks, if not months of time.
If we conclude that an injury occurred due to something other than an unavoidable accident, then we immediately file a complaint with the applicable State agency and investigate further.
These cases can be extremely expensive – successful prosecution requires the hiring of doctors and other medical/nursing home experts to testify on behalf of our client and the out-of-pocket costs can be in the tens of thousands of dollars. But we handle these cases on a CONTINGENT fee bases and front all the costs so the family never has to worry about having to pay out of pocket costs.
These cases can take time to resolve and when we pursue nursing home negligence cases we leave no stone unturned – we really dig in so this can be a lengthy process. We always advise the family that there is typically no quick resolution to these cases and we have to work as a team because we want to make sure the family is ready for a lengthy process.
More often than not – once a client or client’s family member contacts us it’s because something has gone wrong. If you suspect wrong doing at a nursing home, talk to the nursing home staff, speak to the administrator and directing of nursing, check in on your loved one on different days of the week and at different times of day. The best way to protect your loved ones is to make sure they know you and the nursing home staff knows you. And hopefully there won’t be a problem of if there is one, it can be addressed quickly by the nursing home.
Even a single nursing home case is disturbing and because we specialize in this area of law we see more cases than other firms and unfortunately the number of cases we see is alarming.
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Among the many types of injury laws and cases that Legal Genius handles: Nursing Home Neglect is no exception. Our geniuses handle a large number of cases in Michigan, Ohio, Mississippi, Georgia, Indiana, Alabama, Illinois, and throughout the rest of the country. We also handle cases across the border, in Canada: including Ontario and Toronto. Just fill out one of our contact forms, and one of our geniuses will respond to you, promptly!