The litigation of neglect and abuse of the elderly in assisted living and nursing home facilities is unlike any other personal injury litigation. The second edition of Nursing Home Litigation: Pretrial Practice and Trials has been significantly expanded and will provide you with a detailed step-by-step look at how nursing home cases should be handled. The book's chapters are organized in a way that will help you with your case from pretrial to trial. The first chapter will give you tips and techniques for writing the demand letter. The following chapters provide insight for both the plaintiff's attorney and defense attorney on topics such as interviewing older witnesses, preparing staff for deposition, demonstrative evidence, voir dire, opening and closing arguments. Also included is a FREE CD-ROM of actual depositions of nurses, administrators, directors of nursing and and upper management in nursing homes.
Each chapter in this highly praised book has been revised and updated while new chapters have been added to expand upon even more issues in nursing home litigation. Nursing Home Litigation: Investigation and Case Preparation was written as a reference for attorneys representing either plaintiffs or defendants, with perspectives from experienced attorneys, physicians, nursing consultants, a pharmacist, and nursing home specialists.The book has been organized into four specialized sections. Part One discusses legal strategies you can utilize during the investigation and pretrial of a nursing home case. Part Two explains the liability issues that may arrise in a nursing home setting and among its staff. Part Three describes common allegations that occur in a nursing home case such as falls, skin trauma, infections and more. Part Four provides tips for the defense with information on defense stategies and what nursing homes can do to prevent injuries. This comprehensive text is a legal and medical reference that no attorney or expert involved in a nursing home case can be without. New chapters include: Investigation and pretrial preparation of assisted living cases Nursing home liability and consequences Tampering with medical records Medical defense Defense attorney Claims adjuster Infections Skin trauma Falls
Are you ready to go beyond advising and planning to actively advocating the interests of your elderly clients? You can be, with this two volume handbook from two veteran elder law advocates. In a systematic and practical fashion, the authors address each key practice issue and provide an overview of the basic rules and guiding statutes/regulations, in-depth analysis of elder law practice together with guiding case law, and step-by-step explanation of the advocacy process, revealing how law operates in the real world and where things can go wrong. Plus you'll get their practice-tested minisystem for effective advocacy. After an introductory section explores basic principles, Representing the Elderly Client: Law and Practice addresses the six areas you'll encounter most often: Medicaid Special Needs Trusts Medicare and Managed Care Elder Abuse Nursing Home and LTC Facilities Intra-family and Postmortem Advocacy for Elderly Clients and Heirs. Practice forms, flowcharts, and tables put all essential information at your fingertips. The forms contained in the Author's Advocacy Mini-systems will save you hours of preparation time. Start finding effective solutions to your elderly clients' problems with Representing the Elderly Client: Law and Practice. Along with your Representing the Elderly Client two-volume print set, you'll receive a FREE CD-ROM containing word processing documents used in handling some of elder law's most complex concerns.
Inside this book you'll find answers to these (and many other) commonly asked questions: What To Do If You Suspect Something Is Wrong How to Know If Your Family Member Is Being Abused or Neglected? When Should We Change Nursing Homes: How, When, and Why? Why Consider a LawsuitHow Much Will It Cost? --- Client Reviews --- "Laura Mullins was excellent. She was kind and thorough. - J.B. "Thank you very much...our children will be able to improve their lifestyle and upgrade their living conditions...thanks so much!" - C.W. "I had a great experience with your firm and I would definitely recommend you to a friend or family member. Thank you so much." - A.R. "I was referred to your firm by a good friend. This was my first experience of this nature and your office and Laura made a difficult time a lot easier to deal with. - K.W.
Abuses and Excuses breaks new ground in helping patients and families hold bad nursing homes accountable, sharing a wealth of insider strategies and insights that show, step-by-step, how tho hold the nursing home industry accountable for abuse and neglect. It's an eye opening account of corporate greed, acts of neglect and abuse, an insidious industry culture of cover-up, and the actual harm that inevitably befalls vulnerable nursing home patients all across the country with shocking frequency.
"Drawing on an unusually rich trove of data, the authors have refuted more politically convenient myths in one book than most academics do in a lifetime." —Nicholas Bagley, professor of law, University of Michigan Law School "Synthesizing decades of their own and others’ research on medical liability, the authors unravel what we know and don’t know about our medical malpractice system, why neither patients nor doctors are being rightly served, and what economics can teach us about the path forward." —Anupam B. Jena, Harvard Medical School Over the past 50 years, the United States experienced three major medical malpractice crises, each marked by dramatic increases in the cost of malpractice liability insurance. These crises fostered a vigorous politicized debate about the causes of the premium spikes, and the impact on access to care and defensive medicine. State legislatures responded to the premium spikes by enacting damages caps on non-economic, punitive, or total damages and Congress has periodically debated the merits of a federal cap on damages. However, the intense political debate has been marked by a shortage of evidence, as well as misstatements and overclaiming. The public is confused about answers to some basic questions. What caused the premium spikes? What effect did tort reform actually have? Did tort reform reduce frivolous litigation? Did tort reform actually improve access to health care or reduce defensive medicine? Both sides in the debate have strong opinions about these matters, but their positions are mostly talking points or are based on anecdotes. Medical Malpractice Litigation provides factual answers to these and other questions about the performance of the med mal system. The authors, all experts in the field and from across the political spectrum, provide an accessible, fact-based response to the questions ordinary Americans and policymakers have about the performance of the med mal litigation system.
This book shares insights gained through 5 years of personal experience and research by the author about nursing homes and the government oversight system for nursing homes. It is a substantive 380-page journalistic novel hybrid written by a retired former journalist and certified internal auditor, William J. Beerman, Sr. The author intends the book to provide important information to the public and especially to those who might have a nursing home for themselves or a loved one in their current or future lives. The book is named after William''s mother, Mary Regina, who died after a short stay in a nursing home. After Mary Regina''s death, William filed suit over the mistreatment his mother had suffered, and he began looking into how the government oversees nursing homes. What he found out was alarming. This book presents in an easy-to-read, memoir-like framework, a three-part narrative: (1) the human-interest background story of Mary Regina and William, (2) details of Mary Regina''s hospital and nursing home experiences, and (3) what William learned about government oversight of nursing homes. The book covers state attorneys general lawsuits involving 65 nursing homes and more than 1 million patient-days of nursing home care. The investigations for the lawsuits elicited reports on nursing home operations from former employees who became confidential witnesses. The investigations looked not only at resident treatment, but at how the nursing homes interacted with oversight agencies, and with their parent corporations. Audits by state and federal auditors, and the work of a nursing home quality improvement task force, are also covered. William reports, for example: * Many nursing home administrators knew in advance when state inspectors were coming for "unannounced" inspections. * The federal government''s ratings for nursing homes do not consider the opinions of the people who live in them. * State enforcement actions can vary wildly, from 171 a year under one governor, to two under another in the same state. * Lawyers sometimes seem to be more successful at holding nursing homes accountable than do the agencies established for that purpose. * Even when government lawyers allege that it was mathematically impossible for inadequate nursing home staffs to provide the required care, lawsuits might be thrown out of court based on legal technicalities. * Keeping continent residents in diapers can be less expensive in terms of staff hours for nursing homes than it is to escort them to the bathroom. * In recent years, the number of complaints about nursing homes has risen while the number of citations and enforcement actions has gone down. * Nursing home operators contend that they are victims of excessive regulations and costly unfounded lawsuits, and that Medicaid''s rates for nursing home care fall about $25 per patient-day, or collectively about $7 billion per year, below the cost of providing proper care. * Residents are still in jeopardy; some of the same conditions are reported decade after decade. William grew up in a dysfunctional family, as many of us do. He had a strained relationship with his mother, largely because of a ruthless 13-year scorched-earth divorce war that she waged against his father, who was a steelworker. As Mary Regina grew older, she lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and William lived 1,775 miles away in Las Cruces, New Mexico. When William''s sister died young, he became his mother''s sole surviving offspring. And after Mary Regina broke her hip, William traveled to Pittsburgh and spent 20 days standing by at her bedside in a skilled nursing home. He observed what happened on the day shifts and listened as Mary Regina told him what happened at night. William''s complaints about the nursing home to the state department of health were not handled satisfactorily, so he began researching this book.
Students and professional nurses at any level of clinical practice will find this book to be a vital resource on the basic legal concepts and principles of malpractice, liability, and risk management, and their implications for the profession. The book also provides detailed strategies for dealing with these issues. The content is also highly relevant to practitioners in all other health care and legal disciplines that collaborate in the delivery of health care. Issues discussed include the expanding and evolving roles for professional nurses and the concomitant legal accountability and risk for liability, the increasing incidence of nurses named as defendants in malpractice lawsuits, anticipated changes in our health care delivery system, and breakthroughs in science and technology that will present new legal questions. The book also includes material on other important facets of today's nursing practice, including the growing phenomenon of tele-nursing, the essentials of malpractice insurance, and the legal significance of documentation and patients' medical records. It helps the reader identify the nurse at risk for a malpractice suit and the characteristics of the patient likely to sue. The appendices provide information on state laws concerned with access to medical records, a list of useful websites, a list of state boards of nursing, and a glossary of important terms.
