Nursing Home Abuse Lawyer California Blog

Beginning Jan. 1, 2012, a new California state law will allow California counties to offer a confidential internet system for reporting elder abuse in long-term care facilities.

Currently, those who work in financial institutions, law enforcement and in healthcare, including nursing home staff, are required by law to report suspicions of elder abuse in a “timely manner.” In many counties there can be a long wait before a call is answered due to staff cuts and a high volume of callers. More

1. Visit your loved one at their nursing home often. Besides giving you and your loved one a chance to interact and connect in-person, visiting their nursing home allows you to get to know the staff and the other residents whom they interact with on a daily basis. Since the majority of nursing home abuse and neglect is committed by someone familiar to the victim, regular visits with your loved one may enable you to spot nursing home neglect or abuse before it becomes deadly.

2. Remain calm and professional anytime you are working with a nursing home staff. Establishing calm and even friendly relationships with the nursing home staff at your loved one’s long-term care facility allows you to better monitor their care. It also means that the nursing home staff is more likely to respect and respond to any questions or concerns that you may have about your loved ones long-term care. More

Long-term nursing home and care facilities in Florida are ranked 44 out of 51 states (including the District of Columbia), based on the types and quality of long-term care provided to nursing home residents and dependent adults.

Using a ranking system that compared each state on its overall success in the areas of: quality of life, quality of care and accessibility of care, “Raising Expectations: A State Scorecard on Long-Term Services and Supports for Older Adults, People with Physical Disabilities, and Family Caregivers” was recently published by the AARP Public Policy Institute, the Commonwealth Fund, and the SCAN Foundation. More

It’s difficult to say that one type of elder abuse is more abhorrent than another. Yet when elder abuse takes the form of sexual abuse, it somehow seems worse than almost any other form of abuse perpetuated against an elderly person or a dependent adult.

Elder abuse attorney Stephen M. Garcia represented a woman over 100 years old who was repetitively raped by the manager of a long-term care facility in Riverside, Calif.

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