Seniors

In other blogs I have addressed children’s issues, but on the other end of the spectrum, there are problems that are unique to our senior citizens with respect to chemical restraints, neglect, abuse, deaths, insurance denials, forced arbitration and scams.

Many of you reading this are probably unaware that the use of chemical restraints—that is, drugs— used to subdue or restrain patients have increased dramatically in nursing homes over the last several years, even though most of these patients have no psychiatric diagnosis.  You see, it requires less time to attend to a nursing home resident who is almost passed out in their chair or asleep in their bed than an active nursing home resident.  Trial lawyers, like those at my firm, have not only helped get these patients off these stifling anti-psychotics but the American Justice System—the American lawyer—has also taken on the pharmaceutical giants that market these medicines to control our senior population.

With respect to neglect, we’ve all heard stories of nursing home residents who suffered from inadequate care and who died all too early.  Stories of neglect are very common in American nursing homes!  As a matter of fact, over 14,000 nursing home patients die annually from malnutrition and dehydration alone.  In addition to that, it’s been reported, that roughly 160,000 nursing home residents had at least one pressure ulcer, yet only 35 percent of those with the most severe ulcers received special care for their wounds.  My firm has been very active in assisting nursing home patients and their loved ones in addressing this very critical issue.  As some of you know, these pressure sores can ultimately lead to wounds that are from the skin to the bone causing significant infection and sometimes leading to the resident’s death.

My firm and many other trial lawyers throughout the country have for some time now been attempting to bring more attention to the very serious problems that exist in our nursing homes but, unfortunately, oftentimes our pleas for help from governmental agencies is ignored.  We are therefore left to try these cases to juries in hopes that substantial trial verdicts will cause the nursing homes and their insurance carriers to provide better care for our mothers and fathers.

Another fact that might be surprising to some is that as many as 1.5 million seniors are abused every single year, many in nursing homes.  And that for every case of abuse that gets reported, many believe five more go unreported.  One reason for the underreporting may be that the nursing homes residents are afraid of the repercussions of reporting abuse to largely ineffectual regulatory authorities.

It’s not bad enough that our senior citizens have to be placed in nursing homes with inadequate staffing and underpaid and under-skilled workers, oftentimes seniors and their families (who have faithfully paid their long-term care insurance premiums) have found their benefits cut just when they need them the most.  It seems that insurance companies calculate that few of their terminated insurance policyholders will ever complain and those who do will eventually die if they delay payment long enough.   We’ve tried a number of cases where insurance carriers through their failure to honor their contractual commitments, have been brought to justice in our local courts.

And finally, we have all heard the stories of medical errors being committed in the entire population.  The unfortunate thing is that our seniors represent just 13 percent of the total population, but our moms and dads account for 34 percent of all adverse drug events.   Most of which are preventable.  In our civil justice system we try to insist that the nursing home facilities step up their patient safety systems so as to prevent the negligence connected with adverse drug events.

The long and short of all of this is we must carefully research the facility our seniors are placed in and then be vigilant so as to limit the problems our seniors might otherwise encounter.

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