› $580,975,000 verdict in personal injury case
Silver Lake Care Center of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, voluntarily closed its doors earlier this month after mounting complaints of physical and verbal abuse, financial woes, unresolved staffing issues, and numerous lawsuits alleging neglect and wrongful death, according to the News Examiner-Enterprise.
The secret of Robert Young’s death was almost buried forever with the nursing home resident who suffered from cerebral palsy. But his family kept asking questions. A year later, Young’s body was exhumed from his pauper’s grave and an autopsy was performed, revealing that the man’s death was the result of blunt force trauma to the head, according to the Chattanooga (Tennessee) Times Free Press.
The wife of an 80-year-old who suffered from dementia moved her husband into Elderberry Square assisted living facility in Florence, Oregon, so the staff there could give her husband the care she could no longer manage on her own. But each time she visited him over the two months he was there, something just didn’t seem right. Her frail husband was left unsupervised, during which he fell repeatedly. One fall resulted in a broken wrist. She also found him several times lying in his own waste.
A new rule issued in September by the Bush Administration has made a once routine process of obtaining information from nursing homes to back up claims of abuse and neglect almost impossible. That juggernaut has people who are suing nursing homes wrangling between state and federal officials, according to the Washington Post.
Tennessee nursing homes are lobbying the legislature to put a cap on the amount of damages that plaintiffs can collect in court, according to a report in Nashville, Tennessee’s The City Paper. Sixteen states, including Tennessee, do not put monetary limit for damages such as pain and suffering, which has resulted in millions of dollars in damages awarded to victims for nursing homes‘ violations of patient care. The nursing home industry says without damage limits, nursing homes in those states become a target for out-of-state trial lawyers.
