When we’re faced with the difficult decision to place an elderly relative in a nursing home, we hope that they will receive the level of compassion and care that they deserve. Unfortunately, mistakes can happen in a nursing home, particularly related to medication.
Medication errors can be serious for anyone but can be especially dire for seniors. If your elderly relative has suffered injuries due to a medication error, you might be considering a personal injury lawsuit. Read about how nursing home negligence can cause medication errors and find out why you need to hire a nursing home negligence lawyer for assistance.
Common Mistakes that Cause Medication Errors
Most people don’t realize how easy it is for a medical facility to prescribe or administer the wrong medication. This is especially true for nursing homes where there are often small staffs and large resident populations. Before filing your personal injury lawsuit, it’s a good idea to examine a few of the most common causes of medication errors:
- Your relative’s physician could have prescribed the wrong medication or the wrong dosage.
- Your relative may have drug related allergies that the doctor or nursing home staff did not know.
- The nurse at the nursing home administered the drug improperly or in the wrong amount.
While these are common causes of medication errors, they are not the only causes, which is why you need to identify how the medication error occurred before filing suit.
Proving Negligence
Once you know that a medication error has occurred and that your relative has suffered serious consequences, you will need to prove the negligence of the nursing home. This can be done in several ways.
- Prove that either the prescribing doctor or administering nurse made an easily avoidable error. You will also need to show that this error resulted in serious consequences for your relative.
- Demonstrate that the staff at the nursing home was inadequately trained and that they should not have been allowed to administer drugs to your relative. The advantage of pursuing this path is that it allows you to bring a suit against the nursing home itself instead of a staff member, which can drastically increase your potential compensation.
The best way to prove the negligence of the nursing home is to hire a nursing home negligence lawyer. An experienced attorney will have handled cases like yours in the past and will know how to gather the evidence you need to mount a successful suit. Always hire an attorney before filing a personal injury lawsuit, as it makes the process much easier.
Consult a Nursing Home Negligence Lawyer
After your elderly relative has been harmed by a medication error due to nursing home negligence, your best solution is filing a lawsuit, and the best way to plan your lawsuit is by hiring a nursing home negligence lawyer from The Law Offices of Peter N. Davis & Associates, LLC.
We understand how stressful personal injury lawsuits involving an elderly loved one can be, and we are here to offer you the dedicated and compassionate legal services that you and your loved one deserve. Ask for a free consultation today and one of our attorneys will review the facts of your case and tell you about your options for a lawsuit.