As our parents or grandparents grow older, it can become more and more difficult to take care of them. They may encounter medical issues and health complications that we are unprepared to deal with. When your loved one’s needs become more than you can handle, you might place them in a nursing home where the professional staff cares for them. While the staff in nursing homes might be educated and trained in elder care, they could still be responsible for serious mistakes. It is surprisingly common for patients in nursing homes to suffer injuries because of abuse.
Injuries from nursing home abuse can be very serious. Patients in nursing homes are there because they are in poor health. Nursing home patients tend to be extremely vulnerable because they cannot take care of themselves, and they rely on nursing home staff to care for them. When nursing homes abuse their patients, injuries can be severe and possibly life-threatening. Nursing homes have a duty to care for and protect their patients. When they fail, patients get hurt.
If a loved one like a parent or grandparent suffered injuries in a nursing home, they might be victims of abuse. In such a case, you can file a personal injury lawsuit to claim compensation for your loved one’s damages and injuries. Our Hammond, IN nursing home abuse and injury lawyers will help you secure justice for your loved one. For a free case evaluation with us at Wruck Paupore, call our offices today at (219) 322-1166.
Nursing home patients require almost constant care. While some accidents and mistakes are bound to happen, certain mistakes or accidents are inexcusable. When accidents are not accidents at all, but intentional acts of mistreatment, your loved one may be the victim of abuse. Any act of abuse made in a nursing home is serious because the patient's health and life are at risk. However, mistakes due to abuse may be grounds for a lawsuit.
Accidents in nursing homes could be just that: unfortunate accidents. Other times, these accidents are acts of abuse that give you standing to file a personal injury lawsuit against the nursing home. It is important to understand when an accident becomes abuse.
Abuse occurs when your loved one is harmed at the hands of nursing home staff members. Abuse may take many forms and is not always obvious. Sometimes, abuse is physical and leaves wounds and marks on your loved one’s body. Other times, the abuse is emotional or mental. Frustrated staff members verbally abusing or harassing patients would be considered abusive. Other times, abuse happens over time. For example, if a staff member is withholding meals or medication from a patient causing their medical condition to deteriorate, the patient is being horribly abused.
Sometimes, nursing home staff members do everything they are supposed to do, but injuries happen anyway. In such cases, the nursing home cannot be sued because they did not commit any act of abuse. For example, when a patient falls and hurts themselves because they lost their balance, this might be just an accident. However, if the nursing home knows the patient has mobility problems and purposely took their walker away so they could not leave their bed, that fall could constitute abuse.
Call our Hammond, IN nursing home abuse and injuries attorneys for help figuring out if your loved one suffered because of an accident or abusive behavior.
In nursing homes, patients are particularly vulnerable to abuse. Minor falls or late medication that might not affect a younger person could be disastrous for an elderly nursing home patient. There are several common causes of injuries in nursing homes that patients and family members should look out for as they may be signs of abuse.
Abuse can take many forms. Sometimes, it occurs when nursing home staff members ignore a patient’s needs. This could involve failing to administer medication, help them stay clean, or keep them ambulatory to prevent bed sores. Small instances of abuse may not cause immediate injury, but you may begin to see your loved one suffer over time.
Slip-and-fall cases are not unheard of in nursing homes, especially when patients have trouble walking independently. Nursing home staff are responsible for knowing who needs help moving around and who can be trusted to walk on their own. When staff members allow patients to get up on their own when they should be assisted, the patient could fall. If a staff member knows a patient needs help but chooses to ignore them, the patient is being abused.
Sometimes, acts of abuse are so numerous that there is no single cause of your loved one’s injuries. It is possible that a nursing home hired incompetent staff who do not have the training or skills to care for elderly patients. A nursing home can be held responsible for negligently hiring people that have no business working in a nursing home. Failing to train staff or allowing staff to provide inadequate care could be considered abuse at a managerial level.
Unfortunately, some cases of nursing home abuse involve tragic deaths. If your loved one passed away while under the care of a nursing home, you might have a wrongful death case. Contact our Hammond, IN nursing home abuse and injury lawyers for help with your case.
Damages include all the losses, injuries, and expenses incurred by a patient when they suffer harm in a nursing home. Damages include medical bills for treatment for injuries sustained in the nursing home. Additionally, any lost personal belongings can be included as property losses or damage. It is important to consider the pain and suffering of the patient as it may involve very serious damages.
A patient’s pain and suffering are important to consider because nursing homes can cause severe harm when they are run under prison-like conditions. It is incredibly traumatizing to not only be injured and abused, but to also be trapped in that situation. Our Hammond, IN nursing home abuse and injury lawyers will help you protect the rights of your loved one, fight for damages for their pain and suffering, and potentially seek to have them transferred to another nursing home facility.
If your parent or grandparent suffered harm while in the care of a nursing home, you should consider calling Wruck Paupore at (219) 322-1166 for a free case review. Our Hammond, IN nursing home abuse and injury lawyers will help bring the abusive nursing home and its staff to justice.
Don is a founding partner and one of the nation’s top-ranked personal injury litigators. He is a member of the Multi-million Dollar Advocates Forum, which includes less than 1% of the nation’s trial lawyers, and awarded the highest ranking given by Martindale Hubbel and AVVO.
More importantly, Don understands representing personal injury victims is about more than recovering the best settlement: it’s about helping clients get back on their feet and supporting them in every aspect of their recovery.
In nearly all cases, our clients seek compensation from the wrongdoer’s insurance company. Before forming Wruck Paupore, Jason worked for a prominent law firm representing some of the world’s largest insurers. This experience gives Jason a deep understanding of the insurance industry and the strategies it uses to pay injury victims as little as possible.
Jason -- and our entire team -- put this inside knowledge to work to force insurance companies to pay what is actually owed. Often, we use the insurance company’s own tactics against them as we fight for the full compensation our client deserves.
For more than four decades, Keith has been fighting for injury victims. During that time, he’s watched the insurance industry change, with insurers now more interested in protecting their stock price than treating injury victims fairly.
Since the beginning, Keith has put people first. From his childhood in Gary, Indiana during the 1960’s and working his way through law school, Keith has risen to become one of the Midwest’s most respected trial lawyers. He has never forgotten that being a lawyer is about helping people -- and seeing injury victims through struggles in a way that could change their lives forever.
Over the decades, Keith, Don and Jason have fought relentlessly for clients, even when other lawyers have said the case was impossible to win.
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