Nursing homes provide numerous aspects of care to patients who might not be able to care for themselves. From administering medication to assisting with daily living needs, nursing home patients rely on staff members to care for them. Unfortunately, not all nursing homes are taking care of their patients. Abuse and neglect are rampant in nursing homes throughout Indiana and the rest of the country. Many patients and their families want to know when they should take action against the abuse.
You can sue a nursing home injury in Indiana under several circumstances, most of which involve some sort of abuse. Staff members might be deliberately and maliciously abusing your loved one and intimidating them into staying silent. Other times, the home is neglectful, and patients suffer because of unintentional carelessness. Anytime a patient is injured or dies, a lawsuit may be in order.
If you believe your loved one is suffering from abuse or neglect in their nursing home, speak to our Indiana nursing home abuse lawyers immediately. We can help you report the abuse, have it investigated, and file a lawsuit against the responsible parties. Call the legal team of Wruck Paupore at (219) 322-1166 for a free case review with our Indiana Wrongful Death Attorneys today.
If you want to file a lawsuit against the nursing home in Indiana and staff that you believe abused your loved one, you must do so within a specific amount of time. Statutes of limitations are laws that place deadlines on filing lawsuits. Different types of lawsuits might have different statutes of limitations. For personal injury cases, including nursing home abuse, the statute of limitations is 2 years.
This deadline applies to standard abuse and neglect cases and wrongful death cases in Indiana. Some states have different statutes of limitations for wrongful death, but Indiana generally places wrongful death and general personal injury statute of limitations together.
That said, there may be some unique circumstances where you need to act much more quickly than 2-years to preserve your rights. It is important to act as quickly as possible, but just to preserve the right to bring a lawsuit but to make sure that critical evidence is not lost.
You should note when you believe abuse has happened because the clock starts ticking on the date of the abuse. According to our South Bend nursing home abuse lawyer, it becomes more complicated when abuse is ongoing and happens on more than one date. Generally, you can argue that the statute begins to run on the date of the most recent incident of abuse, but this will depend greatly on individual circumstances. Our Indianapolis nursing home abuse attorneys can help you file your case before your deadline expires.
Abuse in a nursing home is often physical but can also be mental or emotional. Abuse is often intentional and committed by staff members who have no business working with vulnerable patients. It might be unclear why a nursing home employee is abusive. Sometimes, they are frustrated in their job and take their anger out on patients. Other times, they seem to get a perverse enjoyment from hurting their patients. In either circumstance, our South Bend nursing home abuse lawyers can help you hold them accountable.
Often, the abuse is physical and leaves victims with serious injuries that require medical attention. Unexplained bruises, broken bones, cuts, or any other visible injuries could indicate physical abuse. If you notice your loved one has injuries they either cannot or will not explain, you can report the suspected abuse and begin the process of filing a lawsuit.
You can also sue a nursing home for abuse that is not physical. Mental, emotional, and verbal abuse might all be grounds for a lawsuit against a nursing home. In many cases of abuse, the abusers threaten and intimidate their victims into staying silent, thus allowing the abuse to continue. This emotional abuse can take a significant psychological strain on victims, especially since they often have no way of leaving a nursing home on their own.
Any signs of intentional abuse, whether physical or otherwise, may allow you to file a lawsuit. It is important to report the abuse to the appropriate authorities to conduct an investigation and provide you with evidence to support your claims.
Another possible cause of action for a lawsuit against a nursing home is neglect in Indiana. Abuse and neglect are often lumped together, and the terms are used interchangeably. While abuse and neglect often go hand-in-hand, they are different forms of mistreatment. Neglect is often unintentional and tends to happen over time. Where abuse tends to be malicious, neglect might be due to carelessness, laziness, incompetence, or even policies enforced by the nursing home.
Some signs of neglect include malnutrition from missing meals, worsening medical conditions from missing medication doses, bedsores, and poor hygiene. Neglect often occurs when a nursing home fails to take care of a patient's daily needs, like nutrition, medication, and general safety.
It is not unusual for nursing home staff to be doing their best, but poor working conditions lead to neglect anyway. For example, an understaffed nursing home might have competent and caring staff members stretched too thin to provide adequate care. In such cases, the nursing home can still be held liable.
Another good time to sue a nursing home is when a patient dies in its care. Nursing home deaths are fairly common, as patients tend to be older and suffer from health complications. However, not all nursing home deaths are due to natural causes. Abuse and neglect may lead to the victim's death, and their family can sue for wrongful death. Speak with our Hammond, IN nursing home attorneys and Hammond, IN Wrongful Death Attorneys about when you can file a wrongful death lawsuit.
It is important to remember that damages in a wrongful death lawsuit in South Bend, are somewhat different from ordinary personal injury cases. A wrongful death lawsuit in Fort Wayne may compensate damages suffered by their surviving family and estate. This means you can get a wrongful death lawsuit started if you suffered because of the death of your loved one in a nursing home.
If your parent, grandparent, sibling or other loved one suffered physically or emotionally while living in a nursing home, you may be able to sue the nursing home for damages and hold them accountable. This may include instances where your loved one may suffered physical or emotional abuse or if the victim died from the abuse. Call the offices of Wruck Paupore at (219) 322-1166 for a free case evaluation from our Fort Wayne nursing home abuse lawyers or Milwaukee nursing home abuse lawyer.
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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