Nursing Home Abuse Lawyer California Blog

During the recent California nursing strike, a resident died due, allegedly, to inadequate care by a “traveling nurse.”

Known as a traveling nurses or replacement nurses, hospitals, nursing homes, long-term care facilities, and other medical facilities often contract with nursing agencies bring in short or long-term temporary nursing staff. Due to the nursing shortage, nurses are always in short supply. More

The chairman of the United States Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development has recommended that the group issue regulations limiting long-term care facility inspections.

Chairman Tom Latham (R-IA) believes that “inspections for facilities can be ‘duplicative with state and local health and safety codes and at times even contradictory’ under the National Housing Act,” according to one article. 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

In an illegal, but growing, new trend, nursing home residents are returning from emergency hospital stays only to find that they are denied re-admittance into their long-term care nursing home facility.

Left homeless, many are then forced to seek attorney representation and wait in the hospital until a new placement can be found. This often has devastating effects on the elderly person’s physical and mental health.

Residents dependent on Medicaid (Medi-Cal in California), are particularly vulnerable to eviction. Medicaid (or Medi-Cal) pay nursing homes as little as half the amount of money that a long-term care facility gets from private insurance or Medicare or from residents who pay out-of-pocket. Those long-term care facilities that put profits over people, look for reasons to evict lower paying residents. More