Nursing Home Neglect                                    

Families invest lots of money in nursing homes and rehabilitation centers because they believe their loved ones will receive excellent care. Unfortunately, nursing care is often at its worst in these facilities and doctors rarely visit the sick patients.

Common Cases:

• Residents are abused and neglected.
• Patients do not get medicines they need.
• Patients do not have wounds checked and cleaned.
• Patients are left to lie in bed until they develop body sores and infections that lead to sepsis and death.

Actual Case:
Nursing home settles for $2.475M in Texas

The Case:
Failure to timely diagnose and attend to a heart attack resulted in patient’s death.

The Details:
On the morning of February 4, 1999, an 86-year-old resident of a Senior Care Center, began complaining of persistent nausea. From 5:20 to 6 a.m., she made three direct requests to be transferred to the hospital. These requests were ignored until 6:10 a.m. But by 6:20 a.m., the resident was dead.

The case centered around four acts of negligence: (1) failure to recognize classic signs and symptoms of a heart attack; (2) failure to perform a complete assessment of patient-in-crisis when faced with classic signs of a heart attack; (3) failure to call the attending physician and EMS in order to effectuate an immediate transfer of the patient to the hospital; (4) negligent hiring of the charge nurse on duty by the Senior Care Center.

The plaintiff maintained that the patient would probably have survived the heart attack had she been transferred to the hospital in a timely manner. The nursing home ultimately settled for $2,475,000, according to The Blue Sheet.