Common Nursing Problems

Nursing Home Injury Lawyer

Standing operating procedures in nursing homes are going to be substandard at best compared to the Nursing Home Reform Law which is a federal regulation applying to nursing homes that are certified to accept payments from anything that are federally funded such as Medicare and Medicaid.

Roughly 95% of all nursing homes are equipped to take Medicare and Medicaid in the patients that come with Medicare and Medicaid. But they may be performing in a substandard level of performance, and residents and their families might not be aware of their rights under this law or they may know nothing of this law, which resulted in them putting their family members and loved ones into a nursing home as substandard care according to the law.

Let’s dive right in the sum, nursing home problems and how these can lead to injuries and why you might need a nursing home lawyer.

An Overview of the Issues You Might Find in a Nursing Home:

• discrimination against Medicaid beneficiaries;
• family and resident rights regarding development of care plans;
• honoring residents’ preferences;
• providing necessary services;
• use of physical restraints;
• use of behavior-modifying medication;
• use of feeding tubes
• visiting hours;
• “responsible party” provisions in admissions procedures;
• arbitration agreements;
• Medicare eligibility determinations;
• continuation of therapy when resident is not progressing;
• continuation of therapy after Medicare payment ends;
• continuation of residence in Medicare-certified bed, after Medicare payment ends;
• availability of Medicaid-certified beds;
• readmission from hospital;
• supplemental charges;
• resident and family councils;
• evictions; and
• refusal of medical treatment.

Nursing home facilities are there to care for your elderly loved ones over a certain age or with certain dementia based disorders you can no longer care for themselves, and require more care that you can provide them at home such as 24 hour medical care.

There are many lists of abuses and substandard care centers in the nursing home, but here are some of the most common issues that can happen and how these can lead to injuries.

If you are noticing that your loved one has had sores which are skin ulcers that can go down to the bone if they are untreated, you need to look into the staffing of the nursing home your loved one is in, you need to ask about the staff’s training and whether they are properly trained, and you need to make sure that your loved one is being cleaned and paid attention to. One of the ways you get bed sores is if you are an elderly person who is no longer able to stand or turn around in bed on your own, you are laying in the same position for hours at a time and you are not being turned over or moved to different positions.

Rape, physical abuse and other violences are often against the elderly because elderly people might feel ashamed, they might not remember that they were injured, or they might be too afraid to say anything because perhaps nobody will believe them. If you see that your loved ones nursing home facility is having reports of these kinds of things you should check on your loved one.

Most often any kind of injury in a nursing home is due to negligence, and if you think that your loved one has been injured in a nursing home, usually get a nursing home injury lawyer and discuss a few of the cases. Nursing home injury lawyers are going to be equipped to discuss whether you have a case, what the case is going to look like and they are going to have experience in dealing with nursing home cases.

Reach out to nursing home injury lawyers such as the ones at Davis and Brusca LLC today.