Law Firm Resources & News

Let’s face it – most residents in assisted living facilities and nursing homes are incapable of moving quickly. They may be confined to a bed…a wheel chair…or a meri-walker. This reality can have devastating results when a fire breaks out! Virginia law requires fire suppression and alarm systems in its nursing homes. Although it is…

This blog often discusses situations where health care providers do something wrong or fail to do something which should have been done. The issue of whether smokers should get regular lung scans may not fall in either of the situations mentioned in my first sentence. The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) has concluded…

1. Do you want answers to these types of questions?2. What is elder abuse?3. What are the warning signs of elder abuse?4. What is self-neglect and what are the signs?5. What makes an older person vulnerable to abuse?6. Who are the abusers of older people?7. Are there criminal penalties for the abusers?8. How many people…

A congressional report has found that 5,283 — over 30 percent — of the nursing homes in the U.S. were cited for an abuse violation that had to cause harm between January 1999 and January 2001. Over 2,500 of the violations were serious enough to cause actual harm or to place residents in immediate jeopardy…

Some 2 million patients get a hospital-acquired infection (it’s called a nosocomial infection) every year and 90,000 of those patients die. In Pennsylvania alone, more than 19,000 infection cases occurred in 2005 (up from 11,600 in 2004) out of 1.6 million admissions to 168 hospitals, according to a report issued in November by the state’s…

The change in the beginning and end of daylight saving time (DST) may adversely affect medical equipment which use date and time information for diagnosis or treatment, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The new DST began 3 weeks earlier and will end one week later this year. Medical equipment that uses,…

A record breaking $217 million dollar lawsuit last year against a group of Emergency Room Physicians for failing to diagnose a stroke. Over $100,000,000 of that was punitive, meaning, the jury meant to punish the physicians for their negligence. Imagine being the physician – and learning (or knowing) that the plaintiff had offerred to settle…

Well here we go again! Two years ago a Roanoke, Virginia assisted living facility had an outbreak of the group a strep bacterial infection. Several residents died and one lost a leg to a complication from the infection known as necrotizing fasciitis, also known as the “flesh-eating bacteria.” How do I know? My firm represented…

Maybe you thought you had the right to bring a lawsuit to establish responsibility and accountability when you or a family member suffers debilitating injuries or death as a result of medical negligence while in the hospital. You get someone else’s medication or blood transfusion…or maybe someone in the operating room leaves a surgical needle…

…and that is a bad thing! We have shared with you horror stories from all over the country about the poor care provided by nursing homes…some of those stories taken directly from the cases we handle for residents and their families here in Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee. What is being done to improve this…

http://www.sptimes.com/2007/03/01/State/Last_insurance__fix__.shtml Wow – Now I understand the concern that lawsuits cause increase insurance premiums for physicians. I believe the real reason insurance rates increase are because insurance companies want to keep their profit margins high, but that is irrelevant to a new trend in Florida. Doctors ask their patients to sign a release, prior to…