Losing a loved one can be heart-breaking under any circumstances, but it may seem even more tragic when an elderly patient dies after receiving allegedly negligent care in a nursing home. Families who expect nursing homes to take good care of their loved one may feel betrayed when that person dies after alleged neglect or abuse. One Louisiana family has filed a wrongful death lawsuit alleging that the nursing home which was caring for their deceased mother failed to adequately care for the woman.
According to the family, their mother suffered a fractured hip after falling while at the nursing home. The suit alleges that nursing home staff failed to assist their mother for several hours after her initial fall and serious injury. She was reportedly discovered a significant time later by a maintenance man and only then did she receive medical treatment for her injury.
Further, six weeks after the woman had to go through surgery to treat that broken hip, a second medical emergency took place. Nursing home personnel purportedly called the daughter to her mother’s side. The daughter discovered her mother sweating heavily, not to mention unwilling to take any food or drink. After being transported to a hospital, medical staff apparently could not draw her blood due to severe dehydration, and were forced to start the woman on an IV drip in order to rehydrate her.
Unfortunately, even though the family moved the woman to a new nursing home, she died just two months afterward. In the Louisiana wrongful death lawsuit, the family charges the original nursing home with failing to provide the proper level of nursing care, failing to provide proper nutrition and hydration and other failings. Other families who have suffered a similar tragic loss like this may wish to consider filing wrongful death lawsuits of their own as they seek a measure of justice for a lost loved one.
Source: The Louisiana Record, “Wrongful death suit filed against nursing home,” Kyle Barnett, March 7, 2013