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A widow is suing the nursing home where her husband, a patient, died last year after his clothes caught fire when he was smoking on the balcony, has filed a nursing home negligence lawsuit, alleging both the facility and the county are responsible for violating federal regulations, resulting in her husband’s death. 

Plaintiff’s attorney explained to the Philly Voice that decedent had been diagnosed with a number of diseases and ailments that necessitated assistance with many basic tasks. Yet, he was allowed to smoke unsupervised on the day of his death. Records show plaintiff was being treated for Parkinson’s disease, brain disease and bipolar disorder. He needed help to eat, dress and bathe. On the day of the fire, he was smoking a cigarette alone on a balcony at the facility, when his clothing caught fire. He was almost immediately engulfed in flames. He was seriously injured and died about a month later of those injuries, after enduring tremendous pain and suffering.

Smoking in nursing homes is a hot-button issue. Although cigarette smoking is becoming less prevalent in younger generations, thanks to education and awareness campaigns that accurately warn of the danger, older generations didn’t have that benefit – or often the same restrictions. Many long-time smokers may be in poor health, but they remain passionate about their right to smoke – and that doesn’t necessarily change just because they have entered a nursing home. Every center may have varying policies, but those that do allow smoking by residents have a duty not only to protect the smokers, but to balance those rights with the health and safety of other residents and staffers.  Continue reading →

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Investigators with the Government Accountability Office reported recently there are giant gaps in the collection of data on the financial abuse of seniors in nursing homes, making it next to impossible to accurately quantify the scope of the problem. 

The acting director of the agency’s Forensic Audit and Investigative Service Team offered up the latest report to members of the U.S. Senate’s Aging Committee. It’s the first comprehensive look at financial abuse of the elderly in six years. Unfortunately, the report is based on scant evidence – a limited review of just eight cases that were closed between 2011 and 2015. The agency is only allowed to examine cases that have been closed, and that can in some cases take years.

In most cases, the acting director said it’s the court systems of the state – not the federal government – that are in charge of keeping track of financial abuse. However, that isn’t happening in a lot of cases, which means we don’t have a clear picture of how serious a problem this is. Continue reading →

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A state health department has cited seven nursing homes in connection with reports that residents were verbally abused by staffers. The state Department of Public Health in Connecticut cited the nursing homes more than $1,000 each in connection with the incidents. 

In one case, a registered nurse overheard an aide swearing and being disrespectful to the patient. However, it was not reported at the time. The aide was later fired.

In a similar case out of that same state two years ago, six nursing homes were fined by regulators in connection with cases of verbal abuse in nursing homes. In one of those cases, a nursing aide who was assisting a resident in using the toilet swore at the resident, prompting the resident to grab the aide’s shirt and yell. The aide then allegedly pushed the resident down, causing the resident to strike his head on the toilet paper dispenser and land on the wheelchair. The incident wasn’t reported for three whole days.  Continue reading →

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Workers at state-run nursing homes face a higher risk of on-the-job injuries than construction workers or those in manufacturing.

That’s based on the latest figures from the annual report issued by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on workplace illnesses and injuries. There were approximately 2.9 million nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses across the private sector last year and another 753,000 in the public sector, according to the Labor Department. On the whole, that works out to three injuries per 100 full-time workers in the private industry and 5.1 injuries per 100 full-time workers in state and local government. Meanwhile, when it comes to nursing home employees, those who work at state-run nursing homes and residential care facilities are injured at a rate of 12 per 100 full-time workers. This represents more than 13,700 cases of recorded injury or illness suffered by nursing home employees last year. That’s even more than local police, who suffered an injury rate of 11.3 per 100 workers. The Bureau of Labor pointed out also that these figures are actually low because these incidents are often unreported.

Work-related injuries among nursing home workers can have a direct impact on the quality of care that patients receive. First of all, a facility that is well-run prioritizes the safety of all who are present – including the employees, who are critical to the process. A facility that does not have or does not enforce worker safety guidelines is not likely to do so when it comes to patient safety either. Continue reading →

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A woman in Oregon has filed a $2.7 million lawsuit against a nursing home, as well the physical therapy and hospice providers who were on contract with the facility, for alleged negligence resulting in the death of her elderly mother and stepfather. 

According to The Register-Guard, the woman alleges in her wrongful death lawsuit that administrators and therapists at the facility failed to meet the needs of her parents, ages 91 and 92, and that this failure resulted in their premature deaths, just weeks apart from one another.

Plaintiff’s stepfather was 92 when he died in late 2014, and her mother was 91 when she died just a few weeks later. Plaintiff is the representative for the separate estates of both parents, who had each previously been diagnosed with dementia and were deemed a serious fall risk. Even though the nursing home had this knowledge, plaintiff asserts, staffers failed to prevent them from falling numerous times, leading to serious injuries and the acceleration of their deaths.  Continue reading →

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A national nursing home chain with dozens of locations in Florida (including in Orlando) has agreed to pay $145 million to resolve a government lawsuit alleging the company violated the federal False Claims Act by intentionally causing its facilities to submit claims to Medicare and Tricare for rehab services that were not:

  • Reasonable;
  • Skilled;
  • Necessary. 

The chain, Life Care Centers of America, Inc. is based in Tennessee and owns/ operates more than 220 nursing homes across the U.S. Its Florida facilities are listed here. Cases like this matter to patients not just because they involve defrauding taxpayers of federal money, but because vulnerable, elderly residents often end up receiving therapy they do not need and that, in some cases, is harmful.

This $145 million settlement is the largest the U.S. Department of Justice has ever made with a skilled nursing home facility, according to a recent press release.  Continue reading →

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Following the enactment of a new federal rule that prohibits the enforcement of arbitration agreements by nursing homes that accept federal funding (virtually all of them), a group of nursing home operators and industry trade groups are challenging the rule. Interestingly, they are doing so through the very avenue of recourse they are seeking to deny nursing home abuse and neglect victims: A lawsuit. 

In case you aren’t familiar with arbitration, it is procedure whereby legal disagreements and disputes are resolved by an arbitrator rather than a judge. The process is often secretive and arbitrators, rewarded handsomely with contracts from large nursing home corporations, often decide cases in favor of the companies. Even when the terms are more or less favorable to the plaintiff, damages awarded are often a fraction of what they would be had the matter been resolved in court. Arbitration agreements are binding contracts that patients and family members enter into by signing documents often buried in nursing home admission paperwork.

The lawsuit, American Health Care Assn. et al v. Burwell et al, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi, Oxford Division. The lawsuit, which names the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), labels the arbitration clause ban as capricious and arbitrary. The measure also contests the authority of CMS to act as a regulatory agency calling the shots on how nursing homes handle disputes. Plaintiffs in the litigation are asking the federal court to, at the very least, delay the enactment of the ban (the rest of the rule solidifies as law this month) while the court weighs the challenge by the industry group.  Continue reading →

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A $2 million settlement agreed upon by government regulators and a nursing home in Pennsylvania will resolve allegations of violating consumer protection statutes by not providing adequate services to nursing home patients, as promised in marketing materials and advertisements. 

The state’s attorney general announced the settlement, which involved a company called Reliant Senior Care Holdings Inc., which was accused of skimping on necessary staffing levels needed to ensure the basic needs of residents would be met at the firm’s nearly two dozen skilled nursing facilities throughout Pennsylvania. According to the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office, the company failed to deliver on its promise of making sure residents’ individualized needs were met and that personalized service was provided.

So low were the staffing levels at some of these nursing homes, according to the attorney general, that basic, life-sustaining functions – eating, drinking, daily hygiene and incontinence care – were not met on a daily basis.  Continue reading →

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Diagnoses of elder abuse in hospital emergency rooms is often unreported and not identified in hospital emergency rooms, according to a new study conducted by by a group of researchers from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, the University of California San Diego and Weil Cornell Medicine.

Previous research has established that 1 in 10 older adults suffer some form of elder abuse. That’s going to mean tens of thousands more cases of elder abuse treated at hospital emergency rooms as the population continues to age. As it now stands, more than 23 million adults are treated in hospital emergency rooms every year.

Our nursing home abuse lawyers in Orlando strongly believe that this is a major misstep at a critical juncture for vulnerable patients. By the time patients are treated in the emergency room, the abuse has reached a turning point, and it becomes imperative that nurses, doctors and other health care professionals be trained about what nursing home abuse is – and how to recognize it.  Continue reading →

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The federal government has issued a new rule that guarantees patients and their families the right to sue nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. This is huge for victims of abuse, neglect and negligence by these facilities, which have increasingly forced patients to sign mandatory arbitration agreements upon admission.

These contracts strip patients and/ or their legal representatives of the right to have their injury and wrongful death claims heard by a judge and jury. Instead, they are forced to have the dispute weighed via arbitration, which is handled either by a single individual or a panel. It’s done in secret. The results often are not favorable to plaintiffs. Even when damages are awarded, the amounts are often far less than what plaintiffs might expect at trial or even in a settlement, given that nursing homes must account for public scrutiny of their actions (or inaction) and level of care and competence.

The new rule, handed down by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) (a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) prohibits this so-called binding arbitration clause in nursing home contracts for any facility that receives money from Medicaid or Medicare. That is pretty much all of them.  Continue reading →

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