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People who reside in nursing homes are often extremely vulnerable and require care tailored to their specific medical needs. Unfortunately, many nursing home residents experience abuse at the hands of staff members. In such a case, contact an attorney right away.
If you discover that your family member has been abused while living in a nursing home, you should immediately contact the police. You should also remove your loved one from the nursing home and have them evaluated by a doctor. A lawyer can help your family take legal action and get justice and fair compensation. Signs of nursing home abuse can be difficult to spot sometimes. Look for physical changes in your loved one, including deteriorating health or new injuries. Also, look for personality changes. Bouts of depression or anxiety might be symptoms of abuse. Your attorney can help you gather evidence to build a case against the abusers and the nursing home. We need this evidence to get compensation for various economic and non-economic losses and damages.
For a confidential, free evaluation of your claims, call (219) 322-1166 and speak to our nursing home abuse lawyers at Wruck Paupore.
Discovering that a family member has been abused can be a difficult thing to reckon with. Some alarming thoughts might fill your head. How do I stop the abuse? Who do I call for help? How do I stop this from happening again? Your first step should be to contact the police and report the abuse.
People sometimes hesitate to call the authorities. There is always a fear that maybe the abuse is imagined, or there is some other explanation for your loved one’s injuries. Contact the police anyway. They may investigate and uncover evidence of abuse or conclude that nothing is wrong. The evidence turned up by the police may be used in a civil lawsuit.
Next, you should take steps to remove your loved one from the nursing facility, if possible. At this point, you might not know for sure who is responsible for the abuse. Leaving your family member in the nursing home might set them up for retaliation from other abusers. Unfortunately, many families have a hard time affording a new nursing home and cannot care for their loved one on their own. Talk to your lawyer about claiming the costs of a new nursing home or private care with your lawyer.
Finally, contact an attorney. Your lawyer can help you build a legal case against the abuser and the nursing home. Our nursing home abuse lawyers can help you gather evidence, evaluate damages, and file the necessary paperwork to begin the case.
As mentioned before, nursing home abuse can be tricky to identify. Even when family members suspect abuse, they might be reluctant to report it for fear that they might be wrong. Below are some common signs of abuse to look out for. If you suspect abuse at all, talk to the authorities.
Abuse is often evident in a victim’s physical changes. Weight is one of the first things that change when people encounter stressful situations. If you notice significant changes in your loved one’s weight, ask them about their life at the nursing home. While weight might change for numerous reasons, abuse might be involved.
A tell-tale sign of abuse is unexplained physical injuries. Perhaps on your last visit, you noticed bruising or cuts that were not there before. If the injuries cannot be explained, you should report the situation to the police. Often, abuse victims have numerous unreported injuries, and many times, they do not heal correctly because a doctor never treats them.
Keep an eye on your family member’s overall condition. Many people live in nursing homes because they have significant medical needs and are in poor health. If their health takes a sudden turn for the worse, they might be enduring abuse. Abusers sometimes withhold or tamper with their victim’s medication, leading to serious health complications.
Abuse also takes a mental and emotional toll on victims. Your loved one might exhibit sudden or unusual behavioral changes because of the abuse. For example, many victims become very angry and irritable. If you are used to your loved one being more cheerful and upbeat, this might be a serious red flag.
Depression is also very common. Victims of nursing home abuse often fall into periods of depression because they cannot escape the abuse on their own. They might be unable to communicate about the abuse or are not believed by other staff members. As such, they might feel trapped with their abuser.
Anxiety and fear are also common symptoms of abuse. Perhaps your loved one is more anxious about being left alone. They might be very afraid when you have to end a visit because they know they will be left with their abusers. Talk to your loved one about why they feel so afraid. If you suspect abuse, call the police.
A significant part of your evidentiary arsenal will be your family member’s medical records. After we have determined that your loved one has been abused, we should have them checked out by a doctor immediately. Not only will medical records indicate the severity of your loved one’s injuries, but they might also contain details about old injuries that went unreported. Doctors might spot signs of injuries that did not heal properly because they were never reported. This is a common occurrence in abuse cases.
We should also talk to potential witnesses. Maybe other staff members saw signs of abuse. Maybe they even reported signs of abuse, and there is official documentation of their reports at the nursing home. Witness testimony can be extremely powerful and should not be underestimated.
We should also consider testimony from your loved one. If they are in a sound state of mind, their testimony might be extremely important. Unfortunately, many nursing home residents have trouble with memory and other cognitive functioning, making their testimony much less reliable.
For a confidential, free evaluation of your claims, call (219) 322-1166 and speak to our nursing home abuse lawyers at Wruck Paupore.
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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Wruck Paupore P.C.
Injury Lawyers
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Dyer, IN 46311
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