Articles Tagged with nursing home abuse and neglect

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In San Bernardino County and throughout Southern California, there are millions of older adults, many of whom reside in nursing homes or assisted living facilities. According to data from the California Health Benefits Review Program (CHBRP), adults aged 65 and up represent the “fastest growing age group” in California. In 2021, there were 6 million older adults living in the state, and that number has since increased. By 2030, the CHBRP estimates that the state’s population of adults aged 65 and up will total nearly 9 million, or 20 percent of California’s population. Is it possible to prevent nursing home abuse and neglect among this aging population?

While incidents of nursing home abuse and neglect can be based on factors specific to a facility, there are also risk factors associated with individuals. What are the general risk factors to consider in nursing home abuse or neglect cases? Our San Bernardino nursing home neglect lawyers can discuss some of the most common risk factors with you.

Understanding Abuse and Neglect Risk Factors in Nursing Homes and Assisted Living Facilities

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Many nursing home residents in Orange County and throughout Southern California, as well as at assisted living facilities in the area, require help with activities of daily living (or ADLs). Activities of daily living include things like getting dressed, bathing, using the bathroom, and eating. Help with ADLs does not need to be provided by a nurse, but families should be able to expect that their elderly loved ones will have the assistance with these activities that they need at any nursing home or assisted living facility in Orange County. When a facility is negligent or when an employee fails to adequately assist a resident with one of these ADLs, the resident can suffer serious and sometimes life-threatening injuries. When it comes to eating, there is a serious risk of choking among older adults who need assistance.

What do you need to know about choking hazards among older adults and facility liability for these injuries? Our Orange County nursing home neglect attorneys can say more. 

Choking Hazards and Older Adults

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Nursing home abuse and neglect injuries in San Bernardino nursing homes can take many different forms, and they can have varying causes. It is important for families with elderly loved ones in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities to be on the lookout for common injury signs, and to know when those injuries may have resulted from abuse or neglect. In many cases, nursing homes may not intend to cause any harm, but as a result of passive neglect, seniors can suffer debilitating and life-threatening harm. In those cases, the nursing home may be liable for damages. The following are among the common types of injuries at nursing homes and assisted-living facilities in Southern California.

Broken Bones or Fractures

A senior at a nursing home can sustain broken bone or fracture injuries in many different ways, and a bone fracture may be a sign of abuse or neglect. In some instances, broken bones can result from a slip and fall, or a fall out of bed. Yet fractures can also be signs of intentional physical abuse. Even if a senior slips and breaks a bone, the facility may be responsible. 

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When you are helping an elderly parent or loved one to find a nursing home in Orange County or elsewhere in Southern California, the process of searching for a safe facility can be daunting. While nursing home rating systems exist, recent reports suggest that those ratings may not provide a full or accurate picture of safety violations at those facilities or actual staff-patient ratios. Information about safety violations can be more difficult to locate since that information is not easily obtained through a central repository, depending upon the location of the facility and other factors. How, then, can you identify a safe nursing home in Orange County? 

It is critical to keep in mind that any nursing home can be a site of nursing home abuse or neglect. Even facilities that have no histories of negligence can be the subject of a future investigation. Thus it is nearly impossible to know with absolute certainty that a facility is safe. However, there are certain factors you can look for in a facility to have more confidence in its treatment of and care for residents. Our Orange County nursing home abuse attorneys want to provide you with tips for choosing a facility.

Transparency in Policies

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One way in which nursing home residents in San Bernardino can suffer serious injuries during the summer months is dehydration, heat exhaustion, and other hyperthermia conditions. While many people assume that such injuries or conditions may be common during the particularly warm summer months in Southern California, especially when there is a heat wave, yet no residents at skilled nursing facilities in California should suffer from any of these heat-related conditions simply because the outdoor temperatures are setting records. To be sure, nursing homes in California must ensure that residents are safe and are not subject to extreme temperatures that can cause serious harm.   

If a nursing home fails to provide cooler temperatures for residents during the summer months, can that nursing home be held accountable for injuries? Nursing homes certainly may be liable in certain situations where residents sustain hyperthermia-related injuries as a result of nursing home neglect.

Nursing Home Neglect and Hyperthermia

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The COVID-19 pandemic is causing major disruptions and serious illness concerns in San Diego County and throughout California. Nursing home residents, many of whom are elderly, are not only in a vulnerable age group when it comes to serious COVID-19 infections, but many nursing home residents also have underlying conditions that put them at greater risk for severe infection and even death. To prevent COVID-19 infections in nursing homes, in addition to providing a high quality of care to avoid nursing home neglect injuries, facilities should in theory be improving on the nurse-to-patient ratios required by the state. 

Yet according to a recent article in NPR, the state relaxed its nurse-to-patient ratios in mid-December 2020, which ultimately means that fewer nursing home patients are getting the level of care they need.

Staffing Problems Often Result in Nursing Home Neglect Injuries 

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While most of us like to think about the holiday season as a time of joy and getting together with family members and friends, this holiday season is already looking quite different due to the risks of COVID-19 infection. For many nursing home residents, COVID-19 infections can prove fatal, and residents of nursing homes and assisted-living facilities may be at greater risk of getting sick in an outbreak at one of these facilities. As such, many seniors in San Bernardino County nursing homes likely will not have the same guests this year as in years prior. 

In years without a global health pandemic, the holiday season is often one of the best times for family and friends to look for signs of nursing home abuse and neglect while visiting elderly parents and loved ones. Without regular visits during the holidays, seniors could suffer the effects of nursing home abuse or neglect without having any loved ones nearby to help stop the abuse and to help get care. This holiday season, it is essential to recognize that elder abuse and neglect will not simply stop because there is a global health pandemic. It is important to understand the signs of abuse and to check on elderly relatives who could be suffering from serious injuries in San Bernardino nursing homes and assisted-living facilities.

What Should You Know About Elder Abuse in Nursing Homes? 

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Nursing home residents in Orange County have a wide variety of rights under California law, which are designed to protect nursing home residents from elder abuse and neglect. Much too often, seniors in skilled nursing facilities in Southern California are still subject to poor care and intentional abuse, and many suffer serious or life-threatening injuries as a result. However, it is still important for older adults and their families to know what their rights are under California law. 

Even if the existence of nursing home residents’ rights are insufficient to prevent nursing home abuse or neglect from happening in the first place, recognizing rights and understanding when they have been violated may allow a senior or her family to take action by filing a claim against the facility or a particular healthcare provider. The following are examples of the resident rights in Orange County nursing homes.

General Residents’ Rights in California Nursing Homes

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If you are considering filing an elder abuse claim in Los Angeles County, it is important to understand how much time you have to file a lawsuit. All civil lawsuits have what is known as a “statute of limitations,” which creates a time window for filing a claim. If a plaintiff does not file his or her lawsuit within that time window, the claim can become time-barred. A time-barred claim is one that is barred from being filed because the statute of limitations ran out. In some cases, it can be possible to pause the statute of limitations, which is known as tolling. In the meantime, the following is some important information about the timeline for a nursing home abuse claim.

 
Statute of Limitations for a Negligence Claim

 
Many nursing home abuse and neglect cases are filed as negligence claims under California law. Like many other personal injury lawsuits, the statute of limitations in these cases is two years under Section 335.1 of the California Code of Civil Procure. How does the statute of limitations relate to filing a claim, and when does the “clock” start ticking? In most negligence cases, including claims for injuries resulting from nursing home abuse, the clock on the statute of limitations will start to “tick” on the date of the injury, or the nursing home abuse incident.

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eduard-militaru-Q4PvX80itZ0-unsplash-copy-300x200Are changing demographics at nursing homes in Orange County, California impacting rates of elder abuse and neglect in those facilities? According to a recent article in McKnight’s Long-Term Care News, new research considering the effects of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987 (OBRA 87) is having more of an impact on nursing home demographics than many of us might expect. In short, more nursing homes are admitting patients from hospitals, the diversity of nursing home residents has increased, and the overall percentage of nonprofit nursing homes and other facilities has risen. 

Researchers believe that these shifts should continue as we move into the future, and that they may help to reduce the rate of nursing home abuse and neglect in some instances. The research cited in the article appeared in the Journal of Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine this month. We want to tell you more about the findings.

OBRA 87 was Supposed to Improve the Quality of Care in Nursing Homes

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