Perth Amboy Nursing Home Abuse Lawyer

Caring for an elderly parent or grandparent can require extensive, round-the-clock care from a facility rather than what you can provide in your own home. Entrusting a relative to a nursing home, however, comes with a risk of abuse and neglect, especially if your relative is heavily dependent on facility staff.

Even with that risk, you can make sure that your relative in a nursing home is treated properly. A Perth Amboy nursing home abuse lawyer could investigate what is going on and prepare a personal injury claim to protect your family member.

What Nursing Home Abuse Can Look Like

Abuse in the nursing home setting can range from intentional harm to neglect and substandard care. Intentional actions against residents can be clearly harmful, while less-than-proper care might be harder to identify and understand.

Nursing home staff can act with ill intent toward residents, such as by stealing or damaging property and purposefully denying residents necessary provisions or medicine. Physical violence and degradation could also fall under intentional conduct and harm against a nursing home resident.

Neglect, on the other hand, could take the form of inadequate supervision, poor conditions, or a lack of basic care. For example, understaffing could lead to an inability of facility employees to properly supervise residents and to prevent accidents on site. Vague procedures could also lead to medication accidents (over or underdosing) or other mistakes in taking care of residents in their most fragile years.

Identifying potential abuse is only the first step, though, as the priority must be ensuring a family member’s safety. A nursing home attorney could help with cases of abuse in Perth Amboy by addressing the situation quickly.

What to Do If You Suspect Abuse

If a family member faces abuse as a resident of a nursing home, and they have communicated as much, the first thing to do is remove them from the facility if possible. A transfer can begin voluntarily or with the help of government authorities.

In a serious emergency, calling 911 might be necessary, as well as filing complaints with the New Jersey Department of Health, the Office of Adult Protective Services in the relevant county, and the Long-Term Care Ombudsman. The resident’s safety should come first, and documentation of the abuse can happen as action is taken to protect the resident.

A Perth Amboy lawyer could aid with each step of the process, from securing the relative to gathering evidence of nursing home abuse and preparing a legal claim. Specializing in addressing allegations of abuse, an attorney could articulate what abuse could be happening, bring in the authorities, and start getting evidence through interviews of anyone present and surveillance footage of the facility.

All these actions can lead to making a legal claim against the facility and its employees based on the abusive actions. Poor care rendered without the intention to harm a resident could be grounds for a negligence claim, which will need evidence of a duty of care, breach of that duty, causation, and damages. Preparing a claim requires attention to each of these elements and the facts of the given circumstances.

Speak with a Perth Amboy Nursing Home Abuse Attorney

Confronting nursing home abuse can require quick action and thorough follow-up to protect your family member and make them whole. Fortunately, a Perth Amboy nursing home abuse lawyer could take the lead with the goal of making sure a resident is safe and properly cared for.

At Garces, Grabler & LeBrocq, our attorneys pride ourselves on aggressively pursuing cases for our clients’ benefit and never under-settling out of convenience. If you suspect abuse in a nursing home, contact us as soon as possible for assistance.