Nursing home abuse is any type of harm that comes to elderly residents in long-term care facilities, including physical or emotional injuries, sexual assault, financial exploitation, or other types of abuse.
What Is Nursing Home Abuse?
Nursing home residents have the right to be free from verbal, sexual, physical, and mental abuse, corporal punishment, and involuntary seclusion.
- Abuse means the willful infliction of injury, unreasonable confinements, intimidation, or punishment with resulting physical harm, pain, or mental anguish.
- Neglect means failure to provide goods and services necessary to avoid physical harm, mental anguish, or mental illness.
What Responsibilities Do Nursing Home Facilities Have to Make Sure Abuse Isn’t Occurring?
Nursing homes have a responsibility to “develop and implement written policies and procedures that prohibit mistreatment, neglect, and abuse of residents and misappropriation of resident property”. The law also requires that the facility “must not employ individuals who have been found guilty of abusing, neglecting, or mistreating residents by a court of law or have had a finding entered into the state nurse aide registry concerning abuse, neglect, mistreatment of residents, or misappropriation of their property.”
Simply put, nursing homes, like most companies, have a duty to properly qualify, train, and supervise their employees. Additionally, nursing homes have a duty to enact and enforce proper, safe procedures for hiring, training, and supervising their staff and admitting and caring for their patients. Nursing homes need to ensure that they have the proper number of staff who are adequately equipped to implement and follow their safety plans and procedures to prevent harm and protect their patients, employees, administrators, and third-party vendors. These standards are applicable even during this novel Coronavirus pandemic.
Are Utah Nursing Homes Liable for If Their Patients Contract Covid-19?
COVID-19 has affected lots of nursing home patients. Thousands of patients have caught the potentially deadly disease, some resulting in death, and others still experiencing the long-term effects of the virus. Some states have passed laws to limit the reliability of facilities and health care providers. Utah recently passed a law to protect health care providers from lawsuits related to COVID-19 but the state hasn’t passed any legislation to shield nursing homes from responsibility. If you feel that you’re loved one hasn’t been properly protected by their nursing home facility from COVID-19 contact the Layton nursing home abuse attorneys at Feller & Wendt if you have any questions. Additionally, if you feel that a loved one was sexually abused, neglected, assaulted or otherwise harmed due to the negligent acts or omissions at their nursing home facility, contact Feller & Wendt for a free, no-stress, case consultation.
