Watch on YouTube6:49Get The Legal Help You Need!
Video Summary
This source highlights the unique challenges of pursuing legal action for nursing home negligence, noting that these cases often require a blend of personal injury and medical malpractice experience. Because these claims involve professional standards of care, successful litigation depends on professional testimony and a thorough investigation into institutional history. The legal professionals emphasize that immediate action is vital to ensure that physical evidence, such as surveillance footage, is not deleted. Furthermore, a swift response allows attorneys to secure witness statements before employees or fellow residents are relocated or silenced. To prevent the loss of critical information, law firms issue preservation letters that legally compel facilities to maintain records. Ultimately, the source advises families to seek experienced counsel to navigate the complex insurance policies and evidentiary hurdles inherent in elder care litigation.
Transcription of the Video
Clarke: Let me ask you for a minute about nursing home cases. I know that in nursing home cases, you still have to prove causation, you have to prove liability, damages, and you have to find coverage. But how are nursing home cases different from other kinds of personal injury claims
Jeff: One critical difference is that because nursing homes often provide medical care, there’s a medical malpractice element to those claims, not just the personal injury aspect. Sometimes it’s a little bit of both. So in medical malpractice, we’ve got to prove that they made some medical decision incorrectly that caused the harm, and that requires qualified professionals, medical authorities, doctors, and nursing home professionals, whom we can bring in to help prove that they violated the standards of care that they were supposed to have.
Clarke: What should a person look for, maybe a family member of a person who was injured at a nursing home, what should they look for in a law firm to pursue a nursing home negligence case?
Jeff: Well, you want someone who’s handled those kinds of specific cases because of the medical malpractice element to it. Someone who’s done medical malpractice cases, someone who has been after these nursing homes and found the coverages that they have. Sometimes they’ll have extra policies of insurance. Sometimes people are in these nursing homes by themselves, and these workers come in and do something wrong and injure them, and there’s no one around to say what happened except for their workers. So you want a firm that has an investigative team that can come in and secure the videos and collect the evidence and talk to other people in the nursing home, research the history of the facility and other problems that they’ve had, and we have that investigative team.
Clarke: Well, let me ask you this now. After a nursing home accident where a person is injured and, you know, maybe a fall protocol was not followed, or a person was dropped, or was not adequately nourished, or wasn’t treated the way that they should have been treated, should a family or an injured person wait and see if the nursing home does the right thing, or should they contact us immediately?
Jeff: Well, if they don’t contact us immediately, the evidence will be gone. I can assure you the video of that room or that area of the hallway is going to be no more if we’re not able to access it quickly. The worker who made the mistake and dropped the client or gave them the wrong medicine is going to be fired and disappear somewhere, or be told not to talk to us. And that resident who was a witness, it will now be a different home that the company owns, and trying to find them and locate them can be difficult. We’ve had to locate residents in other states before. I can think of a case where we had to locate someone in Ohio and had our private investigator track them down. It was remarkable that we found this particular witness in this nursing home, just sitting there in the middle of Ohio, and nobody knew where he was.
Clarke: So one of the first things we do in these cases is send out spoliation letters, which direct the nursing home to preserve and provide to us certain important evidence that can be used to prove this claim. And that does two things: it preserves that evidence, but it puts them on notice that this is something that’s serious and they need to protect that information, provide it to us, and know that we are coming to seek the compensation for this person who was injured on their watch. So if you or someone you know has been injured in a nursing home negligence type of situation, then call us. We’ll answer your questions, and we’ll make sure that your case starts right from the very beginning.