Protecting Your Loved Ones: Concerns in Long-Term Care Facilities
Concerns in Long-Term Care Facilities
My name is Tulsa personal injury lawyer Mike Ashworth. What is the fastest-growing population in the United States right now? It is people my age, people who are seniors, that are living longer and longer and longer. I recently lost my mother. She was 93 and sharp as a tack, but her body just gave out. So what we’re seeing is a resurgence in the number of people that need care.
Sometimes it’s called acute care, which means short-term but intensive. Sometimes it’s what’s called long-term care. Long-term care is more of what we would think of at my age as a kid as nursing homes. Sometimes still called that. Now a lot of times they’re called medical communities. Some are called medical resorts, and medical salons, but it’s all essentially the same thing. Somebody who’s aging or has some health condition, or it may be sometimes that there’s somebody that has a closed brain injury, a traumatic brain injury, who may be a young person. They may be in their 20s, but they just can’t care for themselves and they can’t be cared for at home. They will go to these facilities.
Understanding the Risks and Protecting Your Loved Ones
What happens when they get abused, neglected, or mistreated? Well, first you need to make sure when you go in and you sign the authorizations that you ask for their 2567s. You ask for their surveys, the things that have been done in the past five years to show that they’re on the up and up in their operations that are not deficient. The second thing is to understand I’m not an insurance guy, but Medicare specifically excludes long-term care as I understand it through my own recent family experiences. So you want to see about getting some kind of disability or long-term care coverage as a possible buffer, much like everybody’s doing on Medicare Part A, Part B. Now we got C, D, E, and F. You know, they get supplemental insurance to cover that gap is what it’s called. Sometimes it is called gap coverage, but if your loved one is mistreated, they fall and they’re left laying there on the cold floor for a while. Nobody knows how they fell. They’re starting to take a whole bunch of medication they were never taking before, and when you notice that they were lively and interactive before, and now they’re what we would call gorked out. I mean, they’re just zombie-like. They don’t know what’s going on. If you see them restrained, if you go in the room and all of a sudden the rails are up, they’ve never been up before, why are they up? That’s called a restraint. A restraint can be something even simpler. A restraint can be true restraint where you have a gait belt, which is you wrap around somebody’s waist and you stand behind them to help them try to ambulate. They may wrap somebody up, their arms and legs with a gait belt, or they may use bandages, ace bandages, things like that. So those are all things that should be reported. Those are all things that are alarms.
Take Action and Protect Your Loved Ones
If you have a situation involving residential care of any kind, whether it’s home health care in the home, home health care out of the home, it’s a medical spa, whatever, and you believe that your loved one is not being treated properly, give us a call to speak with an Oklahoma nursing home neglect attorney. TulsaPersonalInjuryLawyer.Pro is the website, 918-924-5528. Last bit of advice I’ll give you, I’ve been giving people for years, that is when you put your loved one in a facility, you ask them, do you have liability insurance? Period. Give us a call. We’ll help you.
