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As our parents and other loved ones grow older, we sometimes find ourselves unable to give them the proper care they need. Caring for elders is no small task, and people frequently seek help from places like nursing homes to care for their aging family members. Nursing homes are staffed with medical professionals who are supposed to be skilled and adept at caring for the elderly. We trust these people to take good care of the people we love most. Unfortunately, this trust is sometimes betrayed by nursing home staff, and our loved ones suffer for it.
Nursing home patients are in extremely vulnerable positions. They are unable to care for themselves and greatly rely on nursing home staff to meet their needs. Some patients cannot even perform basic life maintenance, like bathing, eating, or using the bathroom independently. Patients neglected in nursing homes often develop a whole host of medical problems that cause them great discomfort and pain. In some cases, nursing home patients have died because staff failed to care for them properly. When you find your elderly loved one is hurt, you can sue the nursing home and hold them responsible.
If you have noticed your parent or grandparent suffering after entering a nursing home, they may be victims of neglect. Our Indianapolis nursing home neglect attorneys can help you protect your loved ones and hold negligent nursing homes liable. Call (219) 322-1166 to set up a free, confidential legal consultation with our team at Wruck Paupore.
When dealing with cases of nursing home neglect, you are likely dealing with a negligence action. Negligence might occur when nursing home staff fail to take necessary action to care for their elderly patients. This could include failing to help patients eat or neglecting their hygiene until they become sick. Nursing home patients are often completely dependent on the staff that cares for them, so any number of mistakes could be considered acts of negligence.
The injuries involved in your case will depend on what kind of negligence your loved one experienced. It is important to pay attention to nursing home patients’ injuries because they can indicate how the patients were neglected. Issues like weight loss may indicate a lack of proper nutrition. Infections or skin irritations might mean the patient is not properly cleaned or forced to live in dirty conditions.
In very tragic cases, nursing home neglect may lead to the death of patients. This is an incredibly painful loss to suffer, and the nursing home must be held responsible. Wrongful death cases may proceed differently because the patient, who would ordinarily be the plaintiff, is no longer here. However, the patient’s family may bring the lawsuit on their behalf. Contact our Indianapolis nursing home neglect lawyers for more information.
If your case is based on negligence, you must prove several key elements to be successful. These elements are duty, breach, causation, and damages. These four elements work together to create the negligence which harmed your loved one. If any one of these elements is missing from your case, the claim may fail.
The duty element refers to the nursing home’s legal obligation to care for your loved one. Legal duty can be explicitly stated or agreed upon by the parties involved or implied from their behavior. In a nursing home, you leave your loved ones there with the understanding that the staff will take care of them. This duty is implicit in the parties’ behavior and explicit in that it is the very nature of the nursing home’s business.
The concept of breach refers to the breach or violation of the above-mentioned legal duty. A breach of duty could be a single event that caused injury to the nursing home patient. It could also be a series of repeated behaviors that amounted to neglect. For example, a nursing home may have a legal duty to provide patients with their medication every day. If nursing home staff forgets to do this for three days in a row, the nursing home has breached its duty of care.
The element of causation requires a causal link between the nursing home’s breach of their duty and the injuries or harm suffered by your loved one. Essentially, proving this element means proving that your loved one’s injuries were not caused by some other independent source outside the control of the nursing home.
Proving damages means proving that the injury suffered by your loved one was real and not merely hypothetical. Suppose the nursing home did breach its duty of care. If the patient did not actually suffer harm due to the breach, there is no valid cause of action. Call our Indianapolis nursing home neglect lawyers for help.
Cases of neglect in nursing homes can lead to some very serious injuries. Unfortunately, some patients cannot communicate to their families that they are being neglected due to mental or physical disabilities common in old age. However, there are signs and symptoms of abuse that you can look for to prevent your parent or grandparent from suffering neglect:
If you notice any of these issues or anything else that seems out of the ordinary, contact our Indianapolis nursing home neglect attorneys for help.
Sometimes, neglect is so extreme or so prolonged that the patient does not survive. In such cases, family members may sue for wrongful death. According to Indiana Code § 34-23-1-1, the personal representative of the decedent may file a lawsuit for wrongful death. However, the lawsuit is limited to actions the decedent could have sued for if they were alive. According to Indiana Code § 34-23-1-2, damages cannot include punitive damages or damages for the family’s grief.
Damages may include things like the cost of medical care before the deceased died, pain and suffering experienced by the deceased, and any other damages the victim may have suffered because of the neglect they experienced at the nursing home. If your loved one sadly passed away at a nursing home, contact our Indianapolis nursing home neglect lawyers about a possible wrongful death case.
If you believe your parent or grandparent suffered neglect as a patient in a nursing home, you can file a lawsuit to hold the nursing home accountable. Our Indianapolis nursing home neglect lawyers will help you every step of the way. Call (219) 322-1166 to set up a free, confidential legal consultation with our staff 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.
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Dyer, IN 46311
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