Almost every day of the week we get a phone call from someone who has a loved one that was somehow injured or had a problem in an Illinois nursing home. While some homes are good, many are fly by night operations that are only worried about the bottom line, not patient care. They treat their employees like garbage so those disgruntled workers go and treat the patients in a way that they would never treat their own family.
To determine whether or not you have a lawsuit for negligence against a nursing home, you don’t just look to see whether or not the nursing home screwed up. You also need to see what harm their mistakes caused. For example, here are some cases we’ve been a part of in the last few months.
Caller #1 was attacked by his roommate. The caller had a stroke and could not defend himself. It turns out that the roommate had a violent history. Fortunately other than being scared, there was really not an injury that took place other than bruising as the nursing home staff happened to be walking by when it happened and stopped the attacker.
Caller #2 showed up to see her mom in the nursing home and found her laying in her own feces. She learned that her mom had not been attended to for over 24 hours and had multiple bed sores on her bottom.
Caller #3 has a Dad was given the wrong medicine that included penicillin which he was allergic too. He had a terrible reaction to it and spent a month in the hospital as a result.
Caller #4 reached out on behalf of his father who pressed his call button reportedly 10 times over a 30 minute period in an attempt to go to the bathroom. He had an accident and after hitting the call button again a few times with no response and yelling for help (per his roommate), he got up to clean himself off, fell and broke his leg.
In all four examples, the nursing home appears to me to be negligent. We declined case #1 and accepted the other three. Although we’ve helped out many times in cases where a patient was attacked in a nursing home, those people sadly had major injuries. This caller could have been killed or badly injured. Fortunately for him he was not. Lawsuits are never about what could happen, they are about what did happen. In this case, nothing really happened long term. For the other three, they all have real injuries that required medical care beyond the day of the accident. As a result, they have cases that are worth pursuing.
In the big picture, the point is that lawsuits always have expenses and take a lot of time. Illinois nursing home abuse lawyers only get paid if they win the case. So if they are going to take on a claim there has to be actual, provable damages that make taking the case worthwhile.
Now I would never expect you or anyone else to conclude that you have a case or don’t. So if you ever want to talk about a possible claim for free with no commitment obligation, please just click the contact us button on the left side and one of our lawyers would be happy to speak with you.
Tags: Evanston nursing home lawyer, Illinois nursing home attorney, nursing home abuse, Nursing home lawyer