In 2011, a man in Santa Clara California was convicted of elder abuse and was sentenced to 17 years in jail. The case involved a 94-year-old woman who he forcibly raped. In a situation such as this, there may be criminal and civil liability that come into play for the family victimized by the perpetrator.

Civil vs. Criminal

In a situation such as the one described above, there may be criminal and civil law involved in going after the people responsible. These are very different things. The work of the police, criminal courts and the other entities involved in enforcing the law are not necessarily done on behalf of the victims. They’re done on behalf of society as a whole.

According to the Daily Journal, two people who formerly worked at a nursing home were instrumental in turning a jury against a facility accused of rampant abuse and fraud. The women were employees up until 2004, when they decided to speak out about what was going on at the nursing home. Unfortunately, their story is common among nursing home abuse cases.

Phony Claims

One element of the case involved filing phony claims to Medicare and Medicaid, according to the report. This is not uncommon and is something that these agencies have to deal with all the time. Some nursing home facilities claim that care was given that was never rendered or bill for other expenses that are unjustified, taking in the profits off of the claims once they are paid.

According to WABC in New York, a woman who had her grandmother in a nursing home in the Bronx discovered abuse going on by planting a hidden camera in the room. The woman who was being abused suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and from dementia, two conditions which make it much easier for abusers to conceal what they’re doing.

The woman started to get suspicious when she noticed that her grandmother had bruises on her hands. The nursing home administration told her that the woman’s bruises were caused when she was banging her hands on the railings on her bed. The victim’s granddaughter, however, didn’t buy this and decided to hide a camera in a plant in the woman’s room.

Three recent wrongful termination lawsuits filed in Michigan detail how the employees at a nursing home sometimes end up being the ones to assert the rights of senior citizens and other patients.

In one case, an employee filed a wrongful termination lawsuit because she was assigned to a patient that she knew she would not be able to provide adequate care for. The nurse had injured her wrist and had a limitation on how much weight she was supposed to lift. She told management that she could adequately care for the patient to which she had been assigned and, eventually, that resident did end up falling. The nurse told this to a state investigator and that she was told not to write up a report about the incident and, the next day, the nurse was fired, leading to the lawsuit.

Nursing home patients who are the victims of abuse or neglect are oftentimes at risk for conditions that result from improperly cared for wounds and poor hygiene. Among these conditions is septic shock. Septic shock, a condition arising from sepsis, can be fatal to people of an advanced age. In fact, infections can kill perfectly healthy younger people, so it's easy to see how this could be a threat to older individuals.

Watching for the Signs

Pressure sores, also called bedsores, can easily become infected if they are not treated properly. The sores can actually tunnel far into the body, eventually exposing the inner parts of the body to sources of infection. If you're elderly loved one is sent to the emergency room, make certain that you do inquire as to whether or not sepsis or septic shock was part of the reason why they were brought in.

Bedsores occur because people are not moved around enough when they are bedbound, a situation which is entirely preventable. When bedsores do happen, it's usually because the patient isn't being cared for properly, isn't being cleaned properly and isn't getting out of bed during the day to give their body a rest.

Elderly people are not the only people who end up in nursing homes or other residential care facilities. In fact, people with mental illnesses and other severe conditions that make it impossible for them to care for themselves oftentimes end up in these facilities. Sometimes, these facilities end up doing far more harm than good. A facility in Texas, for example, was recently implicated in the death of a mentally ill teenager. That teenager – for $650 per day – had a room in a trailer house with six other patients.

A lot of nursing home abuse and neglect cases involve people who suffer injuries related to immobility. While it might be counterintuitive, being immobile can cause many different types of injuries. These injuries are generally related to not moving around enough or to conditions that are exacerbated by not being able to move around adequately to stay healthy.

Example

Recently, the FBI put out a press release detailing the conditions in a Georgia nursing home that was taking Medicare and Medicaid money but providing inadequate care to residents. In this nursing home, understaffing and a careless environment led to a situation where residents were not given adequate meals, their medical care suffered and they weren't able to enjoy a clean environment. Some immobility related conditions result from poor hygiene. Nursing home residents who cannot take care of their own hygiene anymore oftentimes end up contracting severe illnesses, including infections, because they are not kept clean.

Nursing home abuse can go on for quite a while before it is discovered in some cases, unfortunately. In a lot of cases, nursing home mistreatment is not visited upon every patient at the nursing home. In fact, there are quite a few cases where one or two patients are singled out by staff members and abused mercilessly and continuously. If your loved one is in a nursing home facility where abuse was discovered, you'll want to take the following measures, among others, to find out what happened.

1: Exam

Depending upon the mental clarity of your loved one, it may be difficult for them to communicate what happened to them. In fact, some elderly people will not even remember being abused if they suffer from conditions such as Alzheimer's or dementia. Having a physician examine your loved one to make certain that there are no signs of abuse is the most reliable way to determine if anything was going on physically. Unfortunately, it may be difficult to prove whether there was mental abuse if the patient involved happens to be significantly mentally impaired due to illnesses or very advanced age.

The elderly population is, obviously, at a higher risk of suffering victimization of every type due to their physical frailty and sometimes lack of mental clarity. In situations where you have a home care worker coming in to take care of an elderly loved one, you have to be absolutely certain that you take the time to thoroughly investigate the company that provides this service. This can be an involved process but, in the end, it can prevent you from making a tragically wrong decision.

First, make sure you ask the healthcare provider the following:

If somebody in your family is abused in a nursing home facility, the consequences can be grim. In some cases, people end up perishing because they were abused in one of these facilities or because they were not given the treatment that they needed and that they fully expected to get when they entered the facility. In these instances, you may want to consider contacting a lawyer for nursing home abuse. They may be able to help you file a lawsuit over the nursing home mistreatment.

Understanding Lawsuits

Lawsuits are not intended to be used as tools for punishing crimes. If somebody abused your loved one in a nursing home and they broke the law in the process, the authorities will take care of any criminal penalties that need to be brought against the abuser. Filing a lawsuit is about getting compensation for the pain and suffering and the injuries that your loved one has been put through. If there are criminal charges filed against anybody at the nursing home facility, you still do have an option for filing a lawsuit.