Nursing Home Abuse Lawyers

Abuse vs Neglect in Nursing Homes

While in some cases abuse and neglect are both seen as a type of harm, the main difference lies in intent. Abuse involves intentional harm, while neglect involves a failure to act that leads to harm. Unlike abuse, neglect may not always be intentional, but someone who neglects a senior can still be held accountable if their failure to act leads to injuries and losses.

Another difference between abuse and neglect is that abuse often manifests through direct actions, such as hitting or stealing. Neglect is more about lack of adequate care, though it can still lead to serious harm.

Common Types of Abuse in Nursing Homes

Nursing home abuse can include:

• Physical abuse. This involves hitting, slapping, restraining, or otherwise causing physical harm to an elderly person.
• Emotional abuse. This form of abuse includes verbal assaults, threats, isolation, or manipulation.
• Financial exploitation. This occurs when someone illegally or improperly uses an elderly person’s money or assets. It can involve theft, fraud, or coercing a senior to sign over money and assets.
• Neglect. Neglect involves failing to provide necessary care, such as food, shelter, medical attention, or hygiene. Neglect can be intentional or unintentional, and sometimes it’s classified as a form of abuse and sometimes as a separate form of harm.
• Sexual abuse. This includes any non-consensual sexual contact with an older adult.

In some cases, seniors suffer from more than one form of abuse and neglect. An abuser may financially abuse a senior, for example, but also use physical force or verbal abuse to force the nursing home resident to sign over their house or other assets.

Other Forms of Neglect and Abuse

While physical, emotional, financial, and sexual abuse are most common in nursing homes, the following types of abuse can also occur:

• Medication abuse. This includes incorrect dosing, overmedicating residents to sedate them, or withholding necessary medications.
• Resident-to-resident abuse. While most families think of caregivers as perpetrators of nursing home abuse, this is not always the case. Nursing home residents can harm each other, and in these cases it’s the nursing home’s responsibility to vet residents and to keep everyone safe.

While neglect is sometimes seen as failing to provide essential daily care such as food, water, hygiene, or safe living conditions, there are in fact different forms of neglect in nursing home settings. These can include:

• Medical neglect. This occurs when necessary medical treatments, medications, or health care services are not provided according to doctors’ orders or in accordance with common sense. For example, a nursing home may fail to call a doctor when a resident is showing signs of a serious illness.
• Emotional neglect. Seniors have mental as well as physical needs. When nursing homes fail to provide support, companionship, intellectual enrichment activities, visits, or social interactions, residents can suffer isolation and mental health issues.
• Inadequate supervision. Failing to adequately monitor residents, especially those with mobility issues or cognitive impairments, can lead to slip and fall accidents, wandering, and other dangerous situations.

In most cases, nursing homes are the ones who are neglectful, but a unique situation happens with self-neglect. While not always classified as a form of abuse, self-neglect occurs when an elderly person doesn’t take care of themselves, often due to mental health issues or physical limitations. For example, a senior may not have the mobility to wash themselves and may refuse any help with bathing.

Elderly individuals should have the right to consent to services (or not), but when they can’t make choices that are in their best interests, it’s expected that nursing home staff will step in and consult with families to make sure residents can live with dignity.

How Can a Nursing Home Abuse Lawyer Help?

Nursing home abuse lawyers can help you explore your options, so you know what to do to keep a loved one safe. They can determine whether you have a premises liability claim or another case and what you can do next.

In abuse cases, it’s also unfortunately common for nursing home staff to claim that nothing is wrong. They may blame bruises on simple accidents, and other signs of abuse on mobility issues or medical conditions. It can be hard for a family to know what to believe.

Elderly loved ones may be too scared or ashamed to speak up and talk about what they have suffered in a nursing home. In some cases, their cognitive, mental, or physical health can prevent them from reporting abuse and neglect.

In these situations, nursing home abuse lawyers can investigate the nursing home and subpoena records to determine what happened. They can get you answers and can find all liable parties so you can seek compensation for your loved one. For example, if a nursing home used faulty medical equipment you may have a claim against the nursing home and a products liability claim against the manufacturer, too.

Finding all liable parties is important to get fair compensation. By pursuing financial recovery, you can seek to secure the financial resources you need to pay for a family member’s medical care if they’ve been injured by abuse and neglect. You can also pay for better care, so you can move your loved one to a safer care environment.