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$91.5 Million Nursing Home Award Affirmed
Serving Alabama, Mississippi & Florida including Mobile, Pascagoula, Gulfport, Biloxi & Pensacola
Mon, 10/24/2011
A jury in Kanawha County, West Virginia recently returned a verdict against Heartland of Charleston nursing home for $91.5 million arising from a lawsuit that claimed the facility failed to provide proper feeding and care of a resident. Dorothy Douglas was an 87 year old resident of the facility with Alzheimer's disease. She was admitted to the facility in 2009 and lived there for three weeks. At the end of three weeks she died of complications from severe dehydration. She arrived at the facility with the ability to walk, but the plaintiffs argued that she was confined by the staff at the home to a wheelchair. Heartland workers testified that the nursing home was so understaffed it was impossible to care for all the residents.
Understaffing is nothing new at nursing homes. I've handled hundreds of nursing home cases and in most of them, a lack of staffing contributed to the problems at issue in each case. It is not a problem that is limited to West Virginia, Alabama or Mississippi nursing homes. Understaffing is a nationwide problem. It results not only in dehydration, as in the West Virginia case above, but also bedsores, falls, and numerous other bad outcomes. What has the response been from nursing homes to this glaring problem that puts their resident's lives at risk daily?
Unfortunately, it hasn't been to hire more staff. In Mississippi and Georgia, it was tort reform. The nursing homes decided it was cheaper to pay lobbyists and politicians to pass legislation limiting the amount a jury could award the family of a nursing home resident, than it would be to hire adequate staff. The State Legislatures in MS and GA were happy to accomodate this effort.
In Alabama, the nursing homes tried to get tort reform passed, but were unsuccessful. Their fallback was to put arbitration clauses in nursing home contracts so they would never have to answer to an Alabama jury. This strategy has been successful for them, because the Alabama Supreme Court rarely sees an arbitration clause it doesn't like, and regularly upholds the ability of a nursing home to deprive residents of their right to a jury trial. So if your elderly mom or dad is injured or dies from conditions resulting from understaffing, it's likely you will never be able to present your case to an Alabama jury.
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