The U.S. Health and Human Services Department, the agency that oversees and controls more than $1 trillion in Medicaid and Medicare funding has made a bold move to protect the rights of nursing home patients and their families. The agency has just issued a new rule that prohibits any nursing…
The organizational structure of nursing homes and long-term care centers throughout the country has created challenges for nursing home negligence lawyers seeking to hold these companies and staffers accountable for abuse and neglect of the elderly. It used to be that in most cases of nursing home abuse or neglect, plaintiffs could be…
In Florida, as in many states, there are legal requirements that identify mandatory reporters who must report suspicions of abuse of children or vulnerable adults – including elderly adults residing in a nursing home. Professionally mandated reporters include (but are not limited to): Staff at adult day care centers; Bank…
Florida’s 5th District Court of Appeal scrapped a nursing home arbitration agreement because of an unenforceable damage cap contained therein – one that the court said went to the financial heart of the agreement. In Estate of Novosett v. Arc Villages, the court decided that because this part of the…
If you’re over the age of 35, you could be forgiven for not being familiar with “Snapchat.” But it’s worth learning about, considering it has more than 200 million active users and is one of the fastest social media apps in the world. It’s also being cited in an alarming…
The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently received a report from an organization called Public Justice addressing the problem of mandatory arbitration agreements for nursing home patients and residents of long-term care facilities. Arbitration agreements are contracts that an increasing number of nursing homes require new patients…
Residential agreements are required by most – if not all – nursing home residents at the time of admission. In some cases, these agreements simply lay out the financial obligation of resident seeking placement. However, an increasing number of homes are requiring residents and/or their representatives to sign arbitration agreements.…
Swedish researchers recently tackled the issue of falls in nursing homes in an effort to explore outside-the-box ways of preventing serious injury. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services report notes the incidence rate for falls in nursing homes is about three times the rate of those who live in…
Older adults are not only more prone to suffer falls, they are more likely to incur serious and lasting physical harm as a result of a fall. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a typical nursing home with 100 beds reports 100 to 200 falls a…
Many nursing homes, upon admission, put before patients and patient representatives a huge stack of papers to sign. Buried among those is likely an “arbitration agreement,” or a promise that if a dispute arises as to the level of care, it will be resolved by an arbitrator, rather than resolved…