Nursing Home Abuse During Coronavirus

This video features John Sloan, a Medical Malpractice attorney based in Texas.

Attorney John Sloan | 888-364-6814 | Free Consult

“There have been some terrible instances of high infection and high disease rates.”

Is nursing home abuse during the coronavirus epidemic getting worse?

John Sloan is the founder of Sloan Law Firm. He is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and his firm has offices in Longview, Texas, and Houston, Texas. He focuses his practice on truck and auto accidents, defective products, oilfield accidents, brain injury cases, and other fields of personal injury law.

In this interview, he explains common problems in nursing homes in addition to the nursing home crisis in New Mexico, one of the states hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically among the Navajo Tribe. Nursing homes are closed to visitors, which makes it harder for loved ones of residents to find out if abuse is occurring. An attorney can help investigate suspicions of neglect and wrongdoing.

To learn more, contact the attorney directly by calling 888-364-6814 or by submitting a contact form on this page. There is no charge for the consultation, and you never owe any out-of-pocket attorney fees.

Key Takeaways From John Sloan:

As loved ones age and require additional care, the hope for families is finding a nursing home or care facility that is just as caring and attentive as their home environment. However, nursing home abuse and neglect are alarmingly common. They occur when nursing home management or staff fails to meet the standards of good nursing home practice.

When management is unwilling to spend the money necessary to provide adequate care, residents suffer.

In these situations the staff might be doing their best to provide adequate care to every resident, but might be responsible for caring for too many residents at once. This failure to provide nursing home staff with necessary resources can lead to burnout among employees and subsequently poor treatment of residents. Nursing home management is legally responsible for providing and ensuring an environment in which staff can provide an acceptable quality of care at all times to all patients. Unfortunately, this is often not the case.

Nursing home abuse and neglect are hard to identify without laying eyes on the issues.

While nursing home staff and management are supposed to keep the families of residents apprised of any changes in their loved ones’ health or conditions, there are many times where a family remains uninformed before discovering the injury for themself. However, with nursing homes prohibiting visitors during the coronavirus shutdown, methods of checking up on elderly loved ones are no longer as effective as before. More and more signs of abuse and neglect are being overlooked simply due to a lack of proximity and communication from the facility. This is particularly the case with bedsores, which occur often yet are not frequently reported.

New Mexico and the Navajo Tribe in specific are suffering from particularly high rates of COVID-19 infection.

The rate of coronavirus infection in these areas is actually higher than that of New York state. While the state government is doing what they can to slow the spread of the virus, with nursing homes closed to the public due to the close proximity of staff and residents and higher rates of infection in these facilities, issues of abuse and neglect in these places are particularly exacerbated.

It is essential that family members remain proactive in monitoring their loved one inside a nursing home.

This might mean developing new methods of communicating with your loved one inside the home, as well as checking in with the staff member responsible for their care. If your loved one does not already, providing them with their own cell phone to check in at least once a day is a great way to stay in contact and aware of the goings-on in their facility.

Another essential part of protecting your loved one inside a nursing home is knowing when to involve an attorney. If you suspect nursing home abuse or neglect is occurring, talk to an experienced nursing home attorney. These attorneys have access to experts who can investigate the nursing home and even calculate your loved one’s damages. Nursing home attorneys have a strong understanding of the laws surrounding nursing homes and will be able to detect a violation of those laws in order to help you seek the justice your loved one deserves.

To learn more, contact John Sloan directly by calling 888-364-6814 or by submitting a contact form on this page. There is no charge for the consultation, and you never owe any out-of-pocket attorney fees.

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