Suspicious Injuries at Nursing Homes - New York Personal Injury Attorney Brett Leitner explains the increase in suspicious occurrences where nursing home residents sustain devastating injuries including fractured hips, broken legs, or brain bleeds, and the nursing home staff has no believable explanation for how these injuries happened.
Watch as Brett Leitner of Leitner Varughese discusses methods of investigating to determine the cause of suspicious nursing home injuries.
You receive a call from the nursing home supervisor that your loved one was “found” one day just sitting in their chair with a severely broken hip, and nobody can tell you what happened. You receive a call from the nursing home that your loved one was found “unresponsive” and suddenly died, and nobody can give you a real explanation. Hi, I’m Brett Leitner, one of the partners at the personal injury firm Leitner Varughese in New York. I want to take a few minutes to talk to you about “suspicious injuries” in New York nursing homes. We often receive calls from family members that their relative in the nursing home suffered very serious injuries like fractured hips, broken legs, or brain bleeds, and that the nursing staff has no believable explanation for what happened. Or the nursing home is being evasive and it just feels like they are hiding something. This can be very disturbing and can be a sign of neglect. We have seen many cases in which a nursing home resident fell out of bed, and instead of alerting the supervisor so that a proper injury assessment and investigation can be done, the aide on duty simply put the resident back in bed and didn’t tell anyone else about it. Other times, the nursing home claims that the resident broke their leg, or the their hip, not because of any accident, but merely because the resident has “brittle bones”. Either way, this may be a sign of abuse or neglect. In most situations, the nursing home has a legal duty to investigate the cause of these unexplained injuries, and is required by law to report many of these cases to the New York State Department of Health, so that an outside investigation can be performed. If a hospital receives a nursing home resident with a suspicious injury, the hospital may also report the case to the Department of Health and the proper authorities. In dozens of cases, we have able to uncover the real story after investigation and after litigation, including obtaining copies of the nursing home’s internal investigations and through cross-examination of nursing home witnesses. Our medical experts are often able to review X-rays and MRIs or CT scans to determine whether the injury must have been caused by trauma or something else. We have often found that the story told to the family immediately after the injury is not the whole story. If you have any questions about suspicious injuries sustained in a nursing home, we invite you to call us at (212) 671-1110, or visit us online at www.lvlawny.com, to discuss your legal options. Visit our website where you can view more videos and media content from our law firm.
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