Blog - Page 46

One of the things every person should do before entering a nursing home is to decide on a living will, especially do-not-resuscitate orders. Do-not-resuscitate orders tell doctors and emergency personnel what a patient's wishes are if they are discovered dying. There are several different decisions ...

Lawsuits are an important tool in the fight against poor nursing home care, but there are things that you can do long before a lawsuit is necessary. Most people never really get to see what happens inside of a nursing home, good or bad, until they have to go there themselves. Unfortunately in this c...

Not all health care workers have the best priority of the patients in mind. Over time, the job can jade people and make them do things that they shouldn't. This can lead to an elder abuse situation that must be handled. Depending on what happened, it could put the worker or the facility in the path ...

One major concern about nursing homes is the use of anti-psychotic medication. These drugs do have their uses in patients with mental illness, but some facilities have used them for off-label purposes or to control behavior. The government has been taking steps to reduce the number of anti-psychotic...

As our bodies decline, we may need help in certain behaviors that we can't do on our own anymore. One of these may be eating or swallowing. It is part of a nursing home's job to monitor patients while they eat to prevent choking hazards. A nursing home in California was fined the maximum amount, $1...

One way that families may try to draw attention to the problems in a nursing home is to talk to the media. Putting public pressure on a nursing home can get them to clean up their act, or uncover evidence that can be used in a later lawsuit. One nursing home in Minnesota got a taste of this after s...

Nurses are only human. Mistakes can happen. But when nurses try to cover up their mistakes then that can lead to pain and suffering for residents in nursing homes. One of the ways modern facilities try to keep mistakes from happening is using electronic medical records. Yet even these can be falsifi...

A situation doesn't need to be extreme for a elder care abuse case to proceed. What has to be proven is that the facility breached their duty of care. Allowing problems to develop in a patient's care and go unaddressed is the problem. A case filed in Illinois by an executor claims multiple reason...

The decision to place a loved one in a nursing home can be difficult. In 2012 the National Center on Elder Abuse reported over 5 million cases of nursing home neglect and abuse in the country. The vast majority of these involved physical abuse or neglect. It is imperative that family members monitor...

Transcript: Recent studies show that nearly 1 in 3 nursing homes are guilty of neglect or abuse. Instances of neglect increase in facilities with a low staff to resident ratio. Overworked aides and understaffed facilities simply cannot provide quality care for residents, which leads to neglect. So ...