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Nursing homes promise us they will take good care of our loved ones. However, nursing homes are not perfect institutions, and mistakes and sometimes even intentional abuse are all too common.
You might want to file a complaint about a nursing home in Indiana, but you have no clue about where to begin. Fortunately, Indiana has procedures in place for people to file formal, anonymous complaints about healthcare facilities, including nursing homes. In addition to filing a complaint, you should speak to a nursing home attorney for advice. If your loved one suffered harm in a nursing home, you can file a formal complaint and have an investigation conducted on the matter by the state entity. Our team can also help file a legal claim in court to recover any damages a nursing home causes.
Speak to our Indiana nursing home abuse and neglect attorneys at Wruck Paupore by calling (260) 508-1610 for a free case review.
Sometimes, when we want to complain about a bad situation, we go directly to the people responsible. However, complaining about a nursing home to that nursing home's managers or administration is not always helpful. Unfortunately, we cannot simply trust a nursing home to police itself for bad behavior, so we turn elsewhere to lodge complaints. Our Indiana nursing home neglect and abuse lawyers can help you navigate the complaint process.
You can find complaint forms and important contact information on the Indiana Department of Health (IDOH) website. The IDOH regularly conducts surveys of healthcare facilities. Surveys occur every year or every few years, depending on the type of facility being reviewed. You can file a formal complaint about a specific issue you want to be addressed, and the IDOH is required by law to investigate. You can fill out a complaint form and send it to the IDOH.
While the complaint form is designed to streamline the process, it is not required. There are multiple ways to report a nursing home facility complaint. You can fill out the form and submit it by mail, email, or fax. You can also call the IDOH on their toll-free complaint report line at 1-800-246-8909.
You may also submit a complaint through the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration website. The Adult Protective Services program can respond to complaints regarding the safety of endangered adults. Remember, these reporting systems are not necessarily intended for emergencies. If your loved one is in immediate danger, call 911, and if there is abuse, you should also call law enforcement.
Sometimes, we notice that our older loved ones are not just in a bad situation but an emergency. If you notice physical abuse, there might not be time to file a formal complaint and wait for an investigation. The above reporting processes are good for holding nursing home facilities accountable for their bad behavior.
However, these processes might not be good at intervening in a situation of abuse or neglect. If your loved one is in an unsafe situation that will not be immediately corrected, we recommend removing them from that situation as soon as possible.
If your loved one is being harmed while living in a nursing home, you can call 911 and immediately have them removed from the facility. You should still file a complaint about a nursing home after you have removed your loved one from its care. You should also call our Indianapolis nursing home abuse lawyers for guidance on other legal steps that might be appropriate depending on your situation.
Once you file a formal complaint, you should be notified later that your complaint was received and whether an investigation will be conducted. Understand that complaints are investigated in order of severity. A complaint about abusive nursing home staff members will probably be investigated before a complaint about unclean restrooms or food quality. However, regulatory agencies are required by law to take appropriate action in response to your complaint.
If you have not spoken to an attorney about your situation yet, you should do so as soon as possible. You may also want to remove your loved one from the nursing home in many instances. Whether this is feasible and advisable varies by situation and is something that our nursing home neglect attorneys can discuss with you.
Following your complaint, the state will investigate. While the investigating authority will not disclose your information to the nursing home, they might contact you and ask for additional information for the investigation. It is important that you cooperate and be as candid and detailed as possible about your observations and the issues you have observed. If legal action is taken against the nursing home, the report from the state will constitute important evidence.
The investigation cannot guarantee that any meaningful changes will occur. Abusive staff members might be terminated, or facilities might be brought up to code. In any event, your loved one’s losses and damages are not paid as a result of the investigation.
If your loved one was neglected, abused, or hurt in a nursing home, we can help you file a legal claim to get just compensation. However, filing a claim is easier said than done. There are numerous rules and procedures to follow when submitting your case to a court.
After conducting a thorough investigation of the nursing home’s misconduct, whether neglect or abuse, it is first necessary to determine whether the nursing home is covered under the Indiana Medical Malpractice Act. If it is, a wide variety of procedures must be followed before a legal claim can be filed.
Alternatively, the nursing home services agreement might contain a mandatory “arbitration clause,” which requires that you submit your injury claims to an out-of-court dispute resolution process instead of filing a claim. These agreements are, in our opinion, extremely unfair because they prevent a jury from hearing about what happened. In some instances these agreements may not be enforceable, and we will fight them wherever possible.
Assuming that these restrictions do not apply to your case, a claim against a nursing home in Indiana begins in much the same way as most other legal claims: we must file a complaint with the court. A complaint is an allegation of wrongdoing or harm by the nursing home. Your complaint must contain specific details and information about your case to be filed. The Court may reject a complaint lacking such information.
When we file your complaint, we must also serve notice to the other parties involved, particularly the defendant. In this case, the defendant may be the nursing home and possibly individual staff members or administrators. This gives the defendants the opportunity to respond to our claims and begin building their own case. Increasingly, nursing homes use multiple corporate entities separate from the local nursing home to try and shield themselves from liability for misconduct. We will work to identify all of these potentially responsible entities and ensure that they are named as defendants in the legal claim.
Once your complaint is filed and all necessary parties have been informed, we will deploy a variety of legal strategies and tactics to help prove your claims and get compensation for your loved one’s injuries.
After you file a claim, the first thing to do is wait for a formal response from the defendants called an Answer. This is why it is important to serve notice on all the defendants; they must be given an opportunity to respond. The defendant will either admit or deny the allegations made in your complaint. Exactly which allegations are admitted or denied may come down to the defendant’s legal strategy. They may also assert a variety of “affirmative defenses,” which are legal reasons why they claim they should not be held responsible.
Defendants usually deny the allegations made against them. If this happens, we can begin gathering more evidence using tools available in the legal discovery process and prove your claims of injuries to your loved one. The great majority of our cases will then settle prior to any trial. However, we will prepare your case for trial and be ready to fight to win in the event we do not receive a fair offer to resolve the case.
Anyone can file a complaint. You can be a resident in a nursing home, the family of a resident, or someone visiting the facilities who noticed something wrong. Nursing home staff members are often required by law to file reports about endangered adults under Indiana statute I.C. § 12-10-3-9.
Complaints can be made anonymously, and your information should not be disclosed to the nursing home if an investigation is launched. If you believe the nursing home discovered the person's identity behind a complaint and is retaliating, speak to an attorney immediately.
For a free case assessment, call our Indiana nursing home neglect and abuse lawyers at Wruck Paupore by calling (260) 508-1610.
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.
Contact Us:
Wruck Paupore P.C.
Injury Lawyers
275 Joliet St. Suite #250
Dyer, IN 46311
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