Making the decision to place an elderly family member in the care of a nursing home or assisted living facility is never easy, but it’s often the right choice for your loved one and for the rest of your family. What’s never right is a staff member or administrator neglecting or even intentionally abusing a resident in their care. Unfortunately, that misconduct happens a lot more than most people would prefer to believe.
As upsetting as this situation can be, it’s important for you to be as calm and proactive as possible after learning your family member is being mistreated in their nursing home. That usually starts with getting help from a skilled personal injury attorney. From ensuring your loved one’s safety to demanding fair compensation for the harm they’ve sustained, a seasoned Pennsauken nursing home abuse lawyer can help with every aspect of a lawsuit over misconduct.
What Does Nursing Home Mistreatment Look Like?
While nursing home abuse can take the form of intentional physical or emotional abuse like hitting, yelling at, or inappropriately using restraints on a resident, it’s actually more common for mistreatment in nursing homes to be more subtle than that. In fact, even family members who are paying close attention to their loved ones can miss the fact that their loved one is being mistreated, which is why it can be so important to know some of the signs that abuse may be occurring. Things to watch out for in your family member’s nursing home include:
- Repeated small injuries like cuts and bruises that staff members can’t give good explanations for
- Dirty clothes, bedsheets, and common areas
- Frequent illnesses and infections
- Sudden change in weight
- Sudden changes in a resident’s personality or mood, particularly if it happens mostly around a specific staff member or other resident
- Staff members refusing to let you be alone with a resident during visits
If you’re not sure whether your family member is being mistreated, a Pennsauken nursing home abuse attorney can go over the situation with you and offer guidance about what steps you should take next.
What to Do About Suspected Nursing Home Abuse
While nursing home abuse should never be tolerated, it’s not always something that requires a lawsuit to fix. If your family member is being mistreated but hasn’t suffered any serious physical harm yet, you may be able to resolve the issue by speaking directly to facility administrators, moving your family member to a different facility, or filing a report with the New Jersey Department of Health or the state Long-Term Care Ombudsman.
If your loved one has suffered any physical harm from abuse or neglect, you can demand compensation through a lawsuit or settlement proposal for every negative effect that harm will ever have on them, including:
- Physical pain and suffering
- Emotional anguish and trauma
- Loss of life’s pleasures
- Costs of medical treatment made necessary by the mistreatment
- Damage to the resident’s personal property
A nursing home mistreatment lawyer in Pennsauken can go into more specific detail about what your case might look like during a private initial meeting.
Consider Working With a Pennsauken Nursing Home Abuse Attorney
No form of abuse or neglect in a nursing home should ever be tolerated, whether it’s intentional or just a product of simple carelessness by management. Effectively enforcing your family member’s right to civil restitution on their behalf can be challenging under the best of circumstances, especially if you try to do it alone.
Guidance from a respected Pennsauken nursing home abuse lawyer will go a long way toward ensuring your family’s claim has the best possible resolution. Learn more by calling today.
