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› $580,975,000 verdict in personal injury case
Beasley Allen attorney J.P. Sawyer is representing the family of an Arkansas man who suffered at the hands of staff ill-equipped to care for him at the White Hall Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. The complaint alleges the nursing home facility put profits over people, misrepresenting its ability to properly care for residents in order to hold onto government funding.
Nursing homes that serve primarily Hispanic residents provide a lower quality of care compared to nursing homes that cater to a mostly white clientele, according to a Brown University study. The research, which was recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, looked at the rate of bedsores at nursing homes in select states and found that residents in nursing homes with a larger concentration of Hispanic residents reported having more bedsores than nursing homes with lower concentrations of Hispanic residents.
Shirley Gerhardt admitted her 76-year-old husband Richard into Laurel Canyon nursing home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in December of 2005. He has suffered a broken hip and just couldn’t get around well. On Christmas day, Gerhardt was placed on a bedpan, and forgotten by staff. He sat there, on the bedpan, for 24 hours as the pan began to imbed into his skin. He suffered an open wound that became infected and lead to his death just five days later, according to Wired PR News.
Wes Bledsoe, founder of the victim’s advocacy group A Perfect Cause, cautioned Norman, Oklahoma, residents to heed the warning signs of neglect in patients in the state’s nursing homes, citing a study by the national coalition Advancing Excellence in America’s Nursing Homes. The study found that nursing home residents in Oklahoma had more pressure sores compared to the national average, according to NewsOK.
Helen Lloyd of Delaware said she would take care of the 68-year-old, disabled man. So his family agreed to have him moved from Hillside Center nursing home where Lloyd was employed and into Lloyd’s home. As his caregiver, Lloyd received the man’s monthly Social Security checks. She agreed to use the money to pay for the man’s care and his share of the rent. But authorities later discovered Lloyd was horribly neglecting the man and taking his money for her own personal use, according to Delaware Online/The News Journal.
Sixty-seven-year-old Melvin Raybon laid helpless in his bed at Tucker Nursing Center in Tucker, Ga., while a bedsore grew on his left buttocks and became infected to the bone, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Staff at the nursing home where he lived should have turned him every two hours to prevent the massive bedsore. However employees said there simply wasn’t enough staff to meet that need. Instead, the attorney representing Raybon’s daughter said he was turned about every four hours.
More than 90 percent of nursing homes were cited for violations of federal health and safety standards last year, according to the New York Times . Seventeen percent of nursing facilities had serious deficiencies such as bedsores, medication mix-ups, poor nutrition, and abuse and neglect.
Choosing a skilled nursing facility for a family member can be a daunting task. A web site, MemberoftheFamily.net, aims to help by offering free, easy-to-understand reports based on government surveys of approximately 16,000 nursing homes across the country. The site allows readers to review past and present state survey results, fire safety violations and substantiated complaints for all Medicare/Medicaid-certified nursing homes anywhere in the United States.
A review of the nation’s nursing home inspection reports by the Congressional Government Accountability Office (GAO) lists Alabama among nine states with the worst records of nursing home inspection accuracy, saying inspectors missed serious problems in more than 25 percent of all inspections from 2002-2007. The report said most states still fared dismally, missing at least one serious deficiency in 15 percent of all inspections.
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