A nursing aide at a Hamilton County, Indiana care facility is facing felony charges after a nurse reported walking into a resident’s room and finding him with his hand pressed over an 80-year-old man’s mouth and nose, muffling the resident’s cries for help. The resident has dementia and is legally blind, and requires 24-hour skilled nursing care.
The allegations in this case describe the kind of abuse that is hardest for families to detect and hardest to prove: an assault on a resident who has dementia, cannot see, and cannot reliably report what happened to him. In this instance a coworker walked in. In most instances nobody does.
That is why the details a family can verify matter so much. Residents who depend on staff for every transfer, every reposition and every meal are also the residents least able to describe mistreatment afterward — and the ones whose injuries are most easily attributed to age, frailty or a fall. Bruising around the face, unexplained swelling, a sudden change in mood or a new fear of a particular shift are the signals that families are left to read.
Abuse and neglect are different failures, but they travel together, and they tend to surface in the same conditions: thin staffing, high turnover, weak supervision on overnight and evening shifts, and a culture in which complaints from cognitively impaired residents are discounted. A facility’s obligation under federal nursing home requirements is not only to refrain from abusing residents but to screen, train and supervise the people it puts at the bedside, and to investigate and report allegations promptly when they arise.
Families frequently tell us some version of the same story: they noticed something — a bruise, a flinch, a resident who stopped wanting to be left alone — and they were told it was nothing, or that it was the dementia talking. A resident with cognitive impairment is not an unreliable witness to be dismissed. In our experience, a resident who says he is frightened of someone is very often telling the truth about something.
If you suspect a loved one has been mistreated in a nursing home, document what you see with dated photographs, write down exactly what your relative said and when, ask in writing for the facility’s investigation file and incident reports, and report your concerns to the administrator and to your state’s Long-Term Care Ombudsman. Preserve everything. Facilities are required to investigate allegations of abuse, and what that investigation did or did not do is frequently the heart of the case.
If your family is trying to understand what happened to someone in a nursing home, Bedsore.Law will review the records with you at no cost. Call 844-407-6737 or reach us at bedsore.law/contact.
