In many cases, the staff who work at a nursing home have no intention of hurting the patients they are caring for. However, to properly care for a nursing home patient, staff must be adequately trained. Failing to train the staff can be considered an act of negligence and you may be entitled to compensation if your loved one is injured as a result.
Addressing Duty of Care
A nursing home is responsible for providing a reasonable level of care to nursing home residents. Therefore, lack of training is not an excuse and a nursing home that fails to adequately train its staff can be held negligent as a result.
Determining the Level of Training Required
A nursing home abuse attorney can research the level of training that would be appropriate for nursing home staff. For example, if nursing home staff will be working with a patient suffering from dementia, they will need special training in memory care.
Also, all nursing home staff members should be trained in specific ways. For example, a nursing home staff member will need to be trained on how to perform CPR and will need to know what to do when there is a fire. However, you may not know what forms of training are legally required and you will need help from an experienced nursing home abuse attorney.
Understanding What Happened
When your loved one has become injured, you will need to find out exactly what happened so you can then get to the bottom of what went wrong. For example, your loved one might be suffering from bedsores and the nursing home staff might not know that a patient who is bed-ridden needs to be moved periodically to prevent bedsores from forming.
Your nursing home abuse attorney will then get to the bottom of how the nursing home staff was trained. This can be used to determine whether the nursing home was negligent when training employees.
Paying Punitive Damages
In a small portion of cases, a nursing home may be forced to pay punitive damages. This is because the courts will want to set an example. Failing to train employees for something as important as the care of the elderly can be a reason for the courts to want to punish a staff member.
To maximize punitive damages, you must also maximize your compensatory damages by working with a nursing home abuse attorney to calculate the compensatory damages that you are entitled to.
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