We represent victims of nursing home abuse and elder care abuse, and what that involves is a situation in which a person is in a nursing home, a rehabilitation facility, an extended care facility either for a long period of time or for a short period of time to rehabilitate from an injury, a broken hip, a broken leg, something of that nature.  And during their stay in the elder care or rehabilitation facility, they develop an injury and those injuries range from bed sores, decubitus ulcers which result from not moving the patient around or not adjusting the way they are lying on the bed and therefore causing an ulcer which can be very, very painful and very difficult to get rid of, to injuries such as abuse, outright physical abuse, neglect, things such as injuries by falling because they are not being properly monitored.  They are not having sides of the bed put up.  They are not having night care so that they are falling out of bed.  They are wandering around the facility.

Sometimes we have something called elopement which is when someone at a nursing home or an elder care facility actually physically gets off the premises and wanders away.  And whether these people are coming out of an Alzheimer’s ward or just simply in a nursing home for extended care, it is a situation in which the facility has not provided enough safeguard to keep them from wandering off the facility.

And finally we have things such as malnourishment.  Someone comes into a nursing home or an extended care facility, oftentimes they have specific nutritional needs that need to be met and yet have physical impairments that prevent them from feeding themselves or from getting the proper nutrition.  And it is really incumbent upon the facility to recognize that and to make sure that these people are getting the nutrition that they need and they are not being deprived of food, nourishment, fluids, things like that.