What Five Actions Must Nursing Homes Take to Provide Proper Care?
As New York nursing home neglect and abuse lawyers, we understand the decision to place a loved one in a nursing home or long term care facility is not easy. You want to make sure that your loved one is well taken care of, and that your loved one will receive the level of car, dignity, and respect that we all deserve.
Unfortunately, such care is not always provided.
Residents are left for hours unattended. Those who need to be turned in their beds are neglected, leading to painful pressure sores (which are a form of ulcer). Worse, residents may even be abused by nursing home staff.
What Went Wrong?
In every nursing home negligence case we have accepted, at least one of the following five actions was not properly taken:
- Proper resident assessment. Each resident must be carefully assessed to determine their physical and cognitive functioning and corresponding needs.
- Development of a Plan of Care based upon the assessment of the resident. For example, a resident with difficulty chewing food will need to have meals restricted so that they are not given food that has the potential to cause choking. Those who are bed ridden will need to be turned so that they do not develop pressure sores. Those at risk from falling should not be allowed to walk unattended.
- The Plan of Care Must be properly implemented. All staff need to be aware of each resident’s plan of care, and must carefully follow the Plan of Care established.
- The Plan of Care must meet each resident’s needs. The Plan of Care should be comprehensive, and address both the physical and cognitive needs of residents.
- Reassessment and re-implementation of the Plan of Care. The needs of residents will naturally change over time as they age. Residents may become bed ridden, they may have a stroke that impairs walking or eating, and other physical and mental changes may occur. As a result, the Plan of Care will need to be revised to take into account the changing needs of residents, and the revised Plan of Care will need to be properly administered.
The Legal Basis for Nursing Home Negligence
When nursing homes or long-term care facilities fail to properly take these five actions, injury or even death can result. In such cases, nursing homes and care facilities will often try to paint the picture that such injury or death was “unforeseeable;” – no one could have predicted that a loved one’s injuries or death could have occurred.
This is wrong. In almost all cases, the types of injuries or death that occur are not only foreseeable, but entirely preventable.
Residents that cannot chew and swallow hard foods because of injury will be at a risk of choking if they are given the wrong foods. Bed ridden residents will suffer pressure sores if they are not turned. Those suffering the after-effects of a stroke will be at high risk of falling if they are left unattended.
By failing to properly undertake the five necessary actions noted above, nursing homes and long-term facilities create a foundation for negligence.
We Can Help
When nursing homes and long-term care facilities cause injury or death by failing to provide proper care, we seek to hold them accountable for the full measure of damages suffered. To do so, we retain experts to examine every aspect of a resident’s care, and to determine the level of care that should have been provided.
If your loved one has been injured or died as the result of the neglect of a nursing home or long-term care facility, please call us for a free, no obligation consultation. We accept nursing home abuse and neglect cases on a contingency fee basis, meaning that you will not owe us any fee for our time unless we secure a recovery.
