Nursing Home Abuse FAQ

Medical malpractice can occur in a nursing home depending on the type of healthcare provider that rendered the care. Nursing homes may or may not fall under the Indiana Medical Malpractice Act. Nursing homes are also subject to numerous other rules and regulations.

Pressure sores are also known as “bed sores” or “decubitus ulcers” can many times be the result of abuse, neglect, or negligence in a nursing home. Sometimes a nursing home can follow all the rules and do everything right and a resident develops a breakdown in their skin that leads to a pressure sore, each and every case depends on the facts of the case.

Maybe. Fall down cases in a nursing home depend on a number of factors including proper fall risk assessment, safety protocols and prevention.

Your mother may have a case if the facility had knowledge of the other resident's dangerous propensities. This will require investigation into other acts of violence by the resident and what the facility did to protect the other residents.

It would be a red flag if the loved one developed a big pressure sore or ulcer on the back of their leg or on their sacrum. The pressure sore may be down to the bone and there is the possibility that the area can get infected. It would also be a red flag if your loved one was supposed to be assisted to go from the bed to the bathroom, and you receive a phone call that your family member or friend was found on the floor, and was taken to the hospital with a broken hip. A loved one dying unexpectedly would also be a red flag. So these are the three initial signs that someone should suspect abuse or negligence: bedsores, falls and unexplained rapid demise or unexplained rapid going downhill resulting in death. This is not to say that people in nursing homes do not die, because people do die, but if they were fine one week and the next week something happened and they ended up quickly passing away, then a red flag would need to go up and the next of kin would probably need to talk to somebody about that.

This can really be a problem because people want their dignity so a lot of times they will not tell anyone what happened, or they might not want to be a problem for their family, or they might just be fearful. The nursing home patient's or resident's bill of rights and dignity is one of the issues because the resident should have the ability to make choices and be treated with dignity, they should be respected, they should be listened to and they should not be restrained unless there is a specific order by a doctor for either physical restraint or chemical restraint for a specific medical reason.

It might not. The biggest type of issue faced in Alzheimer's cases is that it really has to be an objective injury. If someone's loved one was in a facility to keep them safe and they ended up getting lost or going out and getting hit by a car or ending up in a field where they could not be found for a day or two and they became dehydrated, then, in that case, it would be clear cut. It would be the same with other types of nursing home cases too. Cases that involve a fall, in which the person ended up breaking their hip, if there were fall risks but the nursing home did not have the proper fall precautions in place, then those are objective types of issues that would not need somebody's testimony. They would not need the demented person's testimony for that, because the result of the situation would show for itself.