Parkersburg West Virginia Nursing Home Abuse Lawyer

Parkersburg WV Nursing Home Ratings GraphWest Virginia has seen a steep rise in nursing home abuse cases in recent years. With disabled and elderly citizens requiring around-the-clock care, it's crucial to ensure their safety. Unfortunately, many nursing homes fail to protect residents from abuse and neglect.

Nursing home staff must provide a safe and comfortable environment for their patients. However, this does not always happen. Often, nursing homes are overcrowded, understaffed, or have untrained workers providing the resident’s care.

Do you suspect your loved one was abused or neglected in a nursing home? The affiliate West Virginia personal injury attorneys can help to stop this systematic mistreatment. Contact our Parkersburg nursing home abuse lawyers at (800) 926-7565 (toll-free phone number) to schedule a free consultation now to get your case evaluated by our attorney.

What Is Nursing Home Abuse?

Nursing homes assist the disabled and elderly to ensure their needs are met and that they have access to necessities all the time. Residents have the right to be treated with dignity and care. Nursing homes in West Virginia are obliged by the law to provide a safe environment to their residents.

 They must also:

  • Keep every resident safe from emotional and physical injury
  • Ensure proper nourishment of the residents
  • Attend to the elderly’s medical needs regularly

Unfortunately, many nursing centers fail to protect residents from abuse, neglect, and mistreatment.

Abuse in nursing homes involves negligent care of your loved one living in the facility, with no access to:

  • Food
  • Clean water
  • Hygienic conditions
  • Grooming, dressing, and socialization

When the nursing home residents are deprived of these rights for a long time, it results in severe injuries or wrongful death.

Why Does Negligence Occur in Nursing Homes?

Many nursing home neglect cases result from the facility administration or staff members. The most common causes of nursing home abuse and neglect are:

  • Inadequate staff, failing to provide the high-quality care
  • Untrained caregivers increase the chances of negligent care.
  • Failure to do background checks of staff members places your loved one in danger.
  • Putting profits over the nursing home residents
  • Stressed caregivers
  • Greedy staff
  • Lack of supervision by the administration

All the above actions are against the law, which means nursing homes committing any of the above offenses can be held accountable in criminal court. However, even if the perpetrator and facility are never held responsible for crimes, the victim or surviving family members can seek justice in civil court.

Forms of Nursing Home Abuse and Neglect

Nursing home mistreatment creates catastrophic health problems. Sometimes, there are signs of abuse when loved ones display a significant change in their behavior. However, the injustice often left psychological injuries, which are more challenging to identify.

Typical forms of mistreatment in nursing homes are:

Physical Abuse

It is when the caregiver, visitor, friend, family member, employee, or another resident uses force against your loved one resulting in physical harm or injury. It includes:

  • Pushing
  • Kicking
  • Slapping
  • Hitting
  • Excessive physical restraint
Emotional Abuse

Emotional abuse is any non-physical harm caused to a resident, such as mental distress, by the staff, visitor, friend, family member, employee, or another resident. It includes:

  • Insults
  • Threats
  • Intimidation
  • Isolation
  • Manipulation
  • Humiliation
Sexual Abuse

Unwanted sexual interaction between the staff, a resident, and anyone else in the facility creates unspeakable harm. Sexual abuse could include:

  • Inappropriate sexual advances
  • Vulgar comments or jokes
  • Non-consensual touching
  • Unwanted participation in watching sexual activity or pornography
  • Forced intercourse, sodomy, or oral sex
  • Groping
Financial Abuse

Financial exploitation could occur when the facility administrator, staff, employee, another patient, visitor, or others force or manipulate a resident to provide information about their financial resources. Financial manipulation could also involve:

  • Unexplained withdrawals from the bank account
  • Unpaid bills
  • Forged signatures
  • Sudden changes in the will
  • Uninformed changes in financial plans
  • Theft of personal belongings or property
Neglect

Caregivers intentionally or unintentionally failing to provide an elderly resident with their fundamental rights, such as grooming, feeding, and dressing, are common signs of negligence that might involve:

  • Unsanitary environment
  • Withholding meals
  • Medication errors
  • Failure to offer timely nutrition and hydration
  • Failure to provide 24/7 nursing services

Negligent care often leads to wrongful death.

Common Signs of Nursing Home Abuse

Many cases of nursing home neglect go unreported. For example, many victims fear retaliation against their abuser, and others cannot communicate due to health conditions like dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Common signs of physical and non-physical nursing home abuse include:

  • Bed sores
  • Bruises
  • Poor hygiene
  • Malnutrition
  • Dehydration
  • Social withdrawal
  • Heavy sedation
  • Difficulty communicating
  • Isolation
  • Anxiety-related symptoms
  • Mental anguish
  • Loss of residents’assets

Take immediate action if you observe one or all of these signs in your loved one to protect other residents from becoming a victim.

How to Protect Your Loved One From Nursing Home Abuse?

Talk to your loved one about what happened. Make notes of any information the victim shares and file a formal complaint with the facility administrator. By law, the Administrator must notify government agencies promptly to protect the victim from further neglect or abuse.

File a formal complaint with the West Virginia Bureau for Public Health. Contact local law enforcement if the abuse was egregious or if sexual assault is involved.

Speak with a nursing home abuse attorney who can help build a compensation case to hold the facility and perpetrator financially accountable.

Hire a Professional Abuse Lawyer to Receive Compensation for Your Suffering

The Parkersburg nursing home abuse lawyers at Nursing Home Law Center, LLC understand the ins and outs of federal and state laws related to abuse. In addition, our legal counselors work diligently to help families, and their abused loved ones receive full and fair compensation for the suffering caused by the nursing home facility.

Was your loved one mistreated in a nursing home? Our affiliate West Virginia personal injury lawyers have all the legal knowledge about filing a lawsuit for nursing home abuse cases. Contact us at (800) 926-7565 for a free case review.

Our law firm works on a contingency fee basis, meaning our attorneys don’t charge the clients any fee until they receive their settlement.

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Client Reviews

★★★★★
Jonathan did a great job helping my family navigate through a lengthy lawsuit involving my grandmother's death in a nursing home. Through every step of the case, Jonathan kept my family informed of the progression of the case. Although our case eventually settled at a mediation, I really was impressed at how well prepared Jonathan was to take the case to trial. Lisa
★★★★★
After I read Jonathan’s Nursing Home Blog, I decided to hire him to look into my wife’s treatment at a local nursing home. Jonathan did a great job explaining the process and the laws that apply to nursing homes. I immediately felt at ease and was glad to have him on my side. Though the lawsuit process was at times frustrating, Jonathan reassured me, particularly at my deposition. I really felt like Jonathan cared about my wife’s best interests, and I think that came across to the lawyers for the nursing home. Eric