Nursing Home Case? Here's What To Do, and What NEVER To Do.

What To Do (And Never Do) If You Have A Nursing Home Case?

In this short, informative video, Chicago Nursing Home Injury Lawyer Scott D. DeSalvo answers the question “What Should I Do If I Have A Nursing Home Injury Case? What if It Is a Tough Case?” in answering the video, Mr. DeSalvo tells you about a tough Nursing Home injury case he was able to settle and derives lessons that are universal from that case.

Hi, guys. Nursing home injury lawyer Scott DeSalvo here.

Today I’m gonna answer the question: What should I do if I have a nursing home case, but it’s got some problems? How should I handle it?

I’m gonna tell you a little about a case that I was just involved in with another attorney, and we were able to settle the nursing home case recently.

We had an older gentleman in a nursing home who had lots of breathing problems. He had advanced COPD. He had lots of breathing problems. He would sometimes have worse breathing problems, and then he would get better, and worse, and better. So it wasa bit of a complicated nursing home case.

One morning, he had really bad breathing problems, which was charted in his chart at about 9:00 AM. The nursing home didn’t send him to the hospital until about 2:00 in the afternoon. They were charting serious problems. They didn’t even call his doctor till noon, and then finally got him to the hospital several hours later.

Now, the argument here on our side is obviously when you know you’ve got a patient with breathing problems, and they exhibit more serious breathing problems, you have to call the doctor and get him to a hospital immediately, because you already know his breathing is weak. If there are any problems that manifest, it’s much more serious for somebody with a breathing problem than somebody who’s normal.

For example, if I had a breathing problem and I started coughing, you’d take it more seriously than if I never had a breathing problem and then I started coughing and wheezing. You’d jump right on it if I had a preexisting problem with it. They didn’t do that.

The problem here, though, is the weakness in the case was: How do we prove that his passing away was related to the delay in the medical treatment versus just the fact that he was very old, very sick, and had a lot of medical problems?

The problem is in front of a jury, we couldn’t be sure that we had a solid chance to win the nursing home case. Really, that’s when these cases settle, when the defense and the insurance company is afraid that they might get hit at trial, and on our side, we’re willing to compromise.

We were able to get a great settlement in a case, but only because good attorneys who cared about the case and spent two or three years litigating and working on the case put it together and pushed the insurance company into sitting down at the table and talking about a settlement.

So why am I telling you the story?

Well, that’s the advice I’m giving you. It is really important if you or a loved one has suffered nursing home abuse, or a nursing home injury or even a medical mistake to talk to a lawyer who’s gonna do the work.

You need to talk to a lawyer with experience who treats you like a human being, gets the information from you, has open communication with you. Then, it’s gotta be a lawyer who is gonna sit down and really analyze the case and push the case forward.

You know, had we not worked on this nursing home case and done a lot of litigation in it before the pre-trial, the defendants probably never would have come to the settlement table.

But it’s caring for the patient, caring for the client, and because you care about them, you work hard on the case for them that sends a signal to the insurance company that even in a case with challenges or problems, even with cases you’re not sure that you can win at trial, those are the kinds of cases that you can get to the settlement table and resolve if you’ve got an attorney doing the right thing.