Identifying Elder Abuse in Nursing Homes

Do you have a parent, grandparent, or loved one living in a long-term care facility? This is a tough situation because you want to ensure that your loved one gets the best care, but most people don't have the time to stop by every day and monitor the situation. If you become aware of problems, you can bring them to the attention of the facility's management, but chances are that you won't discover every disturbing detail. Something could happen to your loved one due to neglect or the lack of care, and the results could be devastating. It's important to know that you can call elder abuse lawyers and get answers to your tough questions at any time of the day or the night.

Was Your Elder Loved One Hurt? Our Elder Abuse Lawyers Los Angeles Will Help

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It's important to remember this: Don't ignore suspected elder abuse. This will just allow for the same unfortunate situation to potentially affect other residents living in the same facility. We are expert elder abuse lawyers in Los Angeles who want to help with your specific situation. An elder abuse attorney is a special type of personal injury lawyer Los Angeles who knows how to hold long-term care facilities licensed by the state of California accountable for their wrongdoing or negligence.You want to hire the best nursing home neglect lawyers in the business and get results. Your loved one deserves justice under the law!

[H2]What Constitutes Elder Abuse

When an elderly or disabled person is confined to a nursing home, it is difficult for this person to advocate for rights to privacy, quality of care, and respect. Typically, we define nursing home abuse as some form of harm that affects the patient, including emotional or physical injuries, sexual abuse, expliting their fannces, or other abuse. Staff members and visitors in these facilities, especially if patients aren't properly monitored, could try to take advantage of an elderly patient with limited abilities to manage his or her affairs.

Is There a Safe Environment for Your Loved One?

As the family member of an elderly person, you have placed your trust into a nursing home or rehab facility to provide a high level of care. This is the same care that loved ones would provide at home if they were able to serve their family members around the clock. If you are not convinced that a nursing home is a safe environment for your family member, you should strive to be present more often, especially visiting at different points of the day, night, and weekend. If the staff members know that you are watching, they may be less likely to be abusive. By being vigilant and random in your visits, you might become more aware of what is going on.

Reports of Abuse

While we would like to assume that nursing homes do proper background checks on all of their staff, there are criminals who pass these controls and get themselves into a long-term employment situation where they can abuse multiple patients. Reports of nursing home abuse might include residents getting physically beaten or sexually assaulted. Their regular care routines could be neglected. Staff members could also swindle them out of their financial assets. All these types of stories and more have dominated the media in the past few years.

Causes of Nursing Home Abuse

Potential causes of abuse stem from how the management of a facility manages resources and delivers care. For example, a local nursing home could be managed by a large senior care corporation. We've seen these causes in our work as highly experienced elder abuse lawyers:

• Budget cuts, which increase the number of patients who are assigned to each nurse in the unit.
• Cutting corners, including saving money on cleaning products, personal care products, supplies, and foods/beverages.
• Lack of training, which indicates employees could provide better care if they had access to better knowledge and skills development.
• Improper background checks, which means people access patients and they weren't properly screened.

Get Help Today With Elder Abuse and Neglect

As the best elder abuse lawyers in Los Angeles, we welcome the opportunity to sit down and review the potential case involving your relative who was living in a nursing home in the LA area. As a personal injury lawyer Los Angeles, one of our attorneys must review the facts of the case and determine if there was potential negligence. Furthermore, there must be a way to recover damages resulting from alleged abuse or neglect which directly affected your relative's condition.

Other Potential Causes of Nursing Home Abuse

There are other factors that also affect how employees are providing care in these long-term care facilities. These can include the following:

• Employee burnout. Too many long shifts and not enough time off.
• Greed. Individual and collective examples exist in every state.
• Inadequate supervision. Too many patients to manage accelerates burnout and leads to more worker and patient injuries.
  Understaffing. There must be enough employees to perform basic facility maintenance and patient care.

For more information on a case review regarding potential nursing home abuse, please contact our friendly and passionate nursing home neglect lawyers today.