Nursing Home Abuse & Neglect
Some of the reported cases of nursing home abuse and neglect are horrendous. According to nursing home abuse lawyers, it's one of those situation where all kinds of bad forces connect together. You have an industry which is known for hiring people that don’t have the experience or the wherewithal to properly treat patients. You have a situation where the settings in these nursing homes are depressing and you may not get some of the brighter minds to work at these places. You also typically get people who need the most amount of care in these places. All three of those things converge on a home. What you get is a resident receiving improper care – and because of that resident’s pre-existing medical condition, something horrible happens.
Decubitis Ulcer Injuries Can Lead To Death
Decubitis ulcers can cause horrible and excruciating pain – to the extent that often times patients are transferred back into the hospital and are put on morphine or some sort of really high narcotic pain medication. If you do not treat an ulcer timely, what happens is that it progresses into a larger stage and the skin, the tissue, opens up and can get infected. Once an infection gets in there, it can spread to the entire body and will frequently cause the death of an individual. It’s a very serious problem that, if not treated quickly and properly, will more likely than not cause people to pass away.
There are mattresses that are being pushed on nursing homes that actually have sensors on them which record how often people are turned and not turned and will send out alerts when someone isn't turned. Nursing homes are resisting purchasing them due to their high cost, but also because of legal exposure. On the flip side, insurance companies for nursing homes are really starting to push these and have said that they won't insure them unless those mattresses are put into their facilities.
Decubitis Ulcer Lawsuits
Who is ultimately responsible when patients develop these ulcers? Nursing home abuse attorneys and elder care attorneys say that it's ultimately the nursing home who is responsible. Although a nurse might be responsible for insuring that a person is moved or turned in a timely manner, the nursing home itself should have protocols for making sure that happens. There should be several levels of checks to make sure that it occurs, not just a single nurse being responsible for that. So when you’re ultimately looking at legal responsibility and who might be a defendant in a nursing home abuse lawsuit, it’s going to be the individual who is always an employee of the home and the home itself because of the way the home is set up and how it’s administered.