Nursing Home Bed Sore Injuries: 3 Things To Do If You Suspect Abuse

What can you do if your loved one has developed bed sores from not being moved enough? According to nursing home abuse lawyers, there are three things you can do when your loved one may have suffered a nursing home injury – report the matter to the health department, contact the nursing home administrator and consult with an attorney to redress the wrong and recover compensation.

1. Report the matter to the public health department. Report it to the public health department in whatever state the nursing home is in so that the public health department can immediately conduct an investigation. They’re pretty aggressive on these things.
2. Contact the administrator. Contact the administrator of the nursing home immediately and consistently harp on them that you need your loved one to have proper care. These first two things combined will ultimately result in your loved one having probably better can than 90 percent of people in nursing homes. So you have to be very interactive to make sure that this is actually going to occur when you suspect that improper treatment is or has happened.
3. Contact an attorney. The time to call a nursing home abuse lawyer or an elder care abuse lawyer is after the bad act occurs. Unfortunately, attorneys are unequipped to change the conduct initially. That’s more of the responsibility of the public health department in the respective states. However, a lawyer gets involved as soon as some injury has occurred as a result of poor or improper treatment.

It's important to remember that if you do not react soon enough by filing a nursing home abuse lawsuit, you may lose your right to do so. Every state has its own statute of limitations in which a lawsuit must be filed. So anyone who suspects that their loved one has been abused in a nursing home setting should seek out a lawyer immediately to make sure that the proper steps are taken to protect your rights.

Bed Sore Injuries Compensation

If someone was injured in a nursing home, assisted living facility or other care facility, they can be compensated for medical treatment required to repair the ulcer and for the extreme pain that they go through when they have one of these ulcers or experience other problems in the home.

When you think about it, these patients are typically elderly and they don’t have as many years left as others might. So, what we’re trying to do is allow them to have the best life that they possibly can in these last few years. To take that away because of improper treatment such as bed sore injuries, also known as decubitis ulcers, and have them go through days, hours, weeks or months of pain and time in the hospital is something for which they should, and can, be compensated.

If the result is the death of your loved one, the damages that are available at that point are really damages for the person and for the loss of that person that he or she may suffer – meaning that if it’s a mother or a father, then obviously you’ve lost that person earlier than you should have and therefore you’re entitled to damages because of that loss.