Nursing Home Abuse and Death
Nursing homes are, unfortunately, a reality of life as our loved ones age. These facilities are expected to provide high-quality long-term care for elderly or disabled residents, ensuring their safety and dignity. However, they can also become places where the elderly suffer physical, emotional, sexual, and financial abuse.
Physical abuse involves bodily harm inflicted by caregivers or other residents, while emotional abuse includes psychological suffering through insults, threats, or isolation. Neglect, often a result of understaffing or inadequate training, can lead to issues like malnutrition, medication errors, or pressure ulcers. Sexual abuse involves unwanted sexual contact, which is especially harmful to residents unable to give consent. Financial abuse, increasingly common, involves exploiting residents' finances through various means.
Recognizing abuse is crucial, as many cases go unreported due to residents’ inability to communicate, cognitive disabilities, or fear of retaliation. Warning signs include unexplained injuries, frequent emergency room visits, behavioral changes, poor hygiene, or unusual financial transactions.
Such abuse can also result in a resident’s death. Deaths in nursing homes may stem from various forms of abuse or neglect, including physical abuse, unmet medical needs, falls due to inadequate supervision, unsanitary conditions, malnutrition or dehydration, medication errors, and elopement (residents wandering off unsupervised). These issues often arise from understaffing, poor training, or systemic neglect within the facility.
To successfully pursue an abuse or wrongful death claim against a nursing home, four key elements must be established: duty of care, breach of duty, causation, and damages. The nursing home must have owed a duty of care to the resident, failed to uphold this duty, and this failure must have directly or indirectly caused the resident’s abuse or death, resulting in quantifiable damages to the resident or surviving family members.
Damages in nursing home abuse and wrongful death cases may include medical costs incurred prior to death, pain and suffering experienced by the deceased, loss of companionship for family members, and in some cases, punitive damages to deter future negligence.
If you or someone you know suffered abuse at a nursing home, contact us immediately.
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