BRIA of Trinity Village
When discussing nursing home abuse, one usually imagines the victim as an incapacitated long-term resident who is easily taken advantage of and has few defenses. However, most US nursing homes also serve short-term rehabilitation patients who require only a few days, weeks, or months of care while recovering from a major medical event before returning home to independence. While only in nursing home care for a short time, these residents are also at risk of suffering abuse and neglect.
Like all nursing home residents, short-term patients are at risk of developing an injury or illness when staff make thoughtless mistakes. They are there to recover from an existing malady, so they are in a more vulnerable state than usual and receiving daily medication, therapy, or other treatment that can easily be botched by apathetic or careless caregivers. They can suffer harm when a staff member gives them the wrong dosage of pain killer, does not help them reposition frequently enough to prevent bedsores, or fails to perform proper hand hygiene when caring for wounds, and more.
They are less risk for intentional abuse, but it certainly can happen. Stressed or corrupt staff may take out frustrations on any resident whom they grow annoyed with. While short-term residents usually have higher cognitive function than many long-term residents, they are not immune to blatant verbal or physical attacks or intentionally rude and petty behavior.
Thousands of both short- and long-term nursing home residents suffer illness, injury, or even death each year from neglect and abuse. In its mildest form, abuse and neglect might be merely uncomfortable, especially for someone who will return to their own home soon and will not suffer long-term. But medical malpractice or criminal acts against even short-term residents can end in disability, psychological damage, or death.
Choosing a Nursing Home
If you or a loved one expect to use short-term rehabilitation services in a nursing home in the near future, Levin & Perconti strongly suggests researching your options for where you will recover. In addition to picking a facility that has the services you need and accepts your insurance, look for one that comes highly rated per Medicare. In our experience, these are the facilities with the fewest instances of abuse.
Every year Medicare-certified nursing homes are rated from Much Below Average to Much Above Average. These ratings are meant to indicate how well individual facilities are performing. Low-rated facilities appear to be struggling to provide adequate care for its residents, while highly rated facilities are successful in doing so. It is the latter kind of facility that you want to use for safety’s sake. You can easily look up these Medicare ratings for prospective nursing homes on medicare.org.
Medicare also publishes its health inspection reports on its website for your use. You can read these to compare facilities based on how many health citations each has received and the severity of those citations. Look for relatively clean health inspection reports, which indicate a facility that is probably providing high quality care.
Combined with nursing home ratings, it should be easy for you to identify which facilities have the least things wrong with them and are more likely to have policies in place that discourage abuse.
Once you have a fair idea of where the best nursing homes are in your area, schedule tours of each one before making a final decision. After all, it’s you and not the Medicare health inspector who will be rehabilitating in assisted living. Visiting in person allows you to get a feel for the facility’s environment. You can observe the cleanliness of the facility, friendliness of staff, and even speak with current residents, with permission.
Visiting in person also allows you to ask questions and get honest answers. With concern to safety, you should ask about staff qualifications, staff to resident ratios, and if you can see their grievance procedure. Look for a facility with a high staff to resident ratio and where many of the staff are registered nurses.
Every nursing home should have a procedure for filing grievances, including anonymous complaints, and they should be happy to give you a copy now and if you book with them. At the end of the day, everything you’ve seen and heard should make you confident in the quality of care you will receive at a facility.
We do our best to help you keep yourself or a family member safe in assisted living. We want you to entrust your care to only the most trustworthy facilities. To help you research and identify the best nursing homes in your area, we share information taken from medicare.org on our own website so you have a quick and easy look at all of the nursing homes you might be considering. It’s just one way we try to reduce the number of nursing home abuse victims in the country.
About BRIA of Trinity Village
7300 W Dean Rd.
Milwaukee, WI 53223
BRIA of Trinity Village is a small nursing home facility with only 87 Medicare-certified beds. The facility provides a variety of medical services to its residents, such as 24-hour nursing care, dementia services, orthopedic rehab, palliative care, bariatric care, hospice care, and more.
Medicare gives BRIA of Trinity Village a disappointing lowest possible rating of Much Below Average. This is due to its Below Average quality measures rating and Much Below Average staffing and health inspection ratings. This terrible health inspection rating comes from the facility’s last 13 health citations. Below is a sample of these deficiencies.
1/22/2019 Failure to provide appropriate pressure ulcer care and prevent new ulcers from developing. The facility did not ensure that a resident received care consistent with professional standards of practice to prevent pressure ulcers. The resident had no pressure ulcers upon admittance to the facility. When signs of pressure were observed, the facility failed to initiate proper measures to prevent pressure ulcers and the resident developed a stage 2 pressure injury on his heal.
1/22/2019 Failure to provide pharmaceutical services to meet the needs of each resident and employ or obtain the services of a licensed pharmacist. The facility did not provide pharmaceutical services to meet the needs of 2 residents experiencing pain. One resident was admitted to the facility with a pain medication prescription to be administered every 4 hours but did not receive the medication until the second day after admittance despite asking for it.
A second resident was admitted to the facility with severe, debilitating pain. The resident was given prescription pain killer but complained that it did not help. Another prescription was ordered, but not given to the resident for two days after the order was received. The back and forth of trying different dosages of pain medication for this resident extended to about a week’s time.
7/31/2018 Failure to provide and implement an infection prevention and control program. The facility did not have an effective infection control program for 2 residents. Two CNAs did not remove gloves or wash hands when switching between areas of the body while bathing a resident and putting on an incontinence brief. Two other CNAs failed to change gloves before dressing a resident after bathing and touching soiled laundry.
Levin & Perconti Are Here to Help
It doesn’t matter how long you were in assisted living, if you or a loved one have suffered harm from an abusive or neglectful nursing home, you have rights and deserve restitution. Levin & Perconti are nationally recognized nursing home abuse experts. Let us fight for you and win the verdict or settlement you deserve like we have for hundreds of other clients. To date, we’ve won over $100 million for nursing home abuse victims. Get the help with your case you need today by clicking or calling Levin & Perconti at 888-424-5757 for a free consultation.
Testimonials
Not only were they so professional but also so caring and thoughtful. It was very difficult going over the facts in our mother's case but they were so compassionate and understanding and allowed us to be with them every step of the way. We were able to sit in on the depositions and we were really able to see how hard they worked on our behalf.
Contact Us
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Notable Results
VERDICT
on behalf of an 85-year-old woman injured in a nursing home when her medications were mismanaged.
VERDICT
for the estate of a 67-year-old man who died from complications related to a fall
SETTLEMENT
for a 59-year-old resident who developed multiple painful and infected bedsores which took four years to heal.
BRIA Nursing Facilities
Our Office
325 N LaSalle Dr Suite 300
Chicago, IL 60654
312-332-2872
