Nursing home negligence can lead to wrongful death

When people reach a certain age or develop special needs, their families rely on assisted living facilities to provide them with professional quality care and attention. After all, nursing homes are expensive, but you do not mind paying the price required to give your loved one the best care available. The problem is that nursing home abuse and neglect are all too common in New Mexico, and these can lead to wrongful death.

What are the causes of wrongful death in a nursing home?

Wrongful death is an avoidable death caused by another person’s wrongful behavior, such as negligence and intentional unlawful actions. Negligence happens when a person fails to exercise reasonable care when performing their duties or when they skip essential steps when performing their duties due to recklessness or indifference. Wrongful death happens in nursing homes because of the following reasons:

• The nursing home staff allows preventable falls to occur and fails to monitor their residents adequately.
• The nursing home staff does not provide the residents with enough nutrition, which leads to malnutrition or dehydration.
• The nursing home staff does not stop violence between residents.
• The nursing home staff makes medication errors.
• The nursing home staff fails to treat bedsores, which eventually worsen and cause life-threatening complications.
• The nursing home staff fails to treat serious medical conditions like sepsis.
• The nursing home staff physically abuses residents.

Surviving family members can hold the people or the facility accountable by pursuing a wrongful death lawsuit.

Why pursue a wrongful death lawsuit?

If you lost a loved one because of nursing home abuse and negligence, it might have happened more than once before in the same facility. It might not be an isolated case. By holding the people or facility liable for their actions, you can get justice for your loved one and prevent others from suffering the same fate.

The loss of a loved one is so difficult to accept. Imagine if the death was preventable. Your loved one would be alive today had the nursing home given them the standard of care they promised to provide.