If a close family member of yours is currently living in a nursing home or assisted living facility, the notion that someone working in that facility might mistreat your loved one might be unthinkable. Unfortunately, nursing home abuse and neglect is a lot more common in Pennsylvania than most people would prefer to believe. It can be hard for even loving and attentive family members to notice that nursing home residents are being mistreated in the first place.
Knowing some of the early warning signs of nursing home abuse in Quakertown can be helpful to protecting your family member from suffering unnecessary pain and helping them recover financially for injuries and losses they’ve already experienced. If you see any of the following symptoms in a nursing home resident, you should strongly consider contacting a nursing home abuse lawyer for help enforcing your family’s rights.
Physical Abuse
A nursing home resident suffering a serious injury with no clear explanation—or just a somewhat unbelievable explanation—from facility staff members should always be cause for concern. If you’re worried about more subtle warning signs of physical abuse in a Quakertown nursing home, you should also be on the lookout for things like:
- Repeated minor injuries like cuts and bruises, especially if they mainly affect the wrists, ankles, or anywhere else that physical restraints might come into contact with the skin
- Missing or unused prescription medications
- Damage to personal property, especially personal effects like eyeglasses
- Changes in a resident’s behavior or mood that happen mainly around a specific staff member
Emotional Abuse
Changes in a nursing home resident’s personality or overall mood can also be signs of verbal or emotional abuse, especially if they end up suffering from severe depression or anxiety when they didn’t before. You should also watch out for previously healthy residents suddenly regressing to childlike behaviors like rocking, nail-biting, or thumb-sucking. If you see a staff member being abrasive or threatening towards a resident, that’s not something you should just accept as normal.
Financial Abuse
In addition to physical and emotional mistreatment, nursing home abuse can also look like a staff member, administrator, or even another resident taking advantage financially of someone dealing with serious cognitive problems. Warning signs of financial abuse in Quakertown nursing homes include unexpected purchases showing up in a resident’s credit card bills, sudden withdrawals from checking or saving accounts, and especially unexpected changes to their will or another part of their estate plan.
Neglect
Finally, mistreatment in nursing homes can sometimes stem from inadvertent neglect rather than intentional abuse, though that doesn’t make it any more tolerable or any less dangerous for affected residents. Signs of neglect in this type of facility can include things like:
- Bedsores at any stage of development
- Unsoiled clothing or bedsheets going unchanged for days
- Sudden and extreme weight loss or weight gain
- Lack of supervision from nursing home staff members, especially in public areas
- A resident wearing inappropriate clothing for the weather or season
These warning signs are an indicator of nursing home abuse in Quakertown and should cause concern for a family.
A Quakertown Attorney Can Help Identify Warning Signs of Nursing Home Abuse
Finding out that a loved one is being abused or neglected by the people paid to care for them is an intensely upsetting experience. If you can pick out early warning signs of nursing home abuse in Quakertown, you may be able to act quickly enough to spare your loved one a great deal of further harm.
Once your family member is safe from whatever mistreatment they were experiencing, your skilled lawyer can help you demand comprehensive compensation for the harm that family member has suffered. Call today to learn more.
