How Do Laws Protect Nursing Home Residents?

There’s just really a simple way to understand all the laws that protect nursing home residents, and here it is: when you go to a nursing home, the first thing they have to do is assess you. They have to make sure that certain things, based on your conditions, might happen unless they take precautions. Then they have to make the proper plan: turning and repositioning, the right medical equipment, watching your nutritional status. Then—and this is where many of them break down—they need the staff to implement the plan. And if, despite everything they do, the result they were trying to avoid happens, then they have to ask themselves: Where did we mess up? Did we mess up in the assessment, the plan, or the implementation? Sadly, it’s often all those categories. But the nursing home always wants to say it’s unavoidable, that “Oh, you’re old and sick, and you’re going to get pressure ulcers, it’s not their fault, it’s your fault, it’s medical condition.” But they can’t say something is unavoidable unless they have taken every reasonable step to avoid the result that they knew in advance was going to happen.

When your loved one is abused, neglected, injured, or killed, or treated in a humiliating and undignified way in a nursing home, you have laws that protect you and lawyers who are willing to enforce those laws. In Illinois, there is something called the Nursing Home Care Act, a law that was passed in 1979 that basically encourages nursing home residents or their family members to hire lawyers if they think they’ve been abused or neglected. And throughout the course of our practice, we were the first to ever use that law. We’ve expanded that law to the maximum to make sure that it can most effectively help our clients.