It’s never easy to move a loved one, such as an aging parent, into a nursing home. However, if they receive high-quality, professional care, you can sleep easy at night knowing that they’re in good hands.

Unfortunately, nursing home neglect and abuse remain a concern throughout the country. Even though you did your homework with the intention of helping your loved one choose the best nursing home, you never know what could go wrong in the future.

Nursing home neglect and abuse takes on many forms, including but not limited to:

• Bedsores or infections: For example, if someone stays in the same position for too long, they can quickly develop bedsores. As a result, a serious infection could set in.
• Medication errors: There’s a good chance that your loved one takes at least one medication (if not many). Any error puts their health at risk. This includes everything from administering the wrong dose to administering the wrong medication.
• Falls: Nursing home falls are often the result of neglect. Someone should be helping your loved one at all times, ensuring that they don’t put themselves in danger.
• Mental abuse: You can’t physically see it, but you can tell that there’s something wrong with your loved one. They aren’t acting like themselves. If this happens, dig deeper to determine if they could be the victim of mental abuse. An example is a staff worker that continually threatens them.
• Unexplained weight loss: Weight loss can happen as your loved one ages, but an unexplained change is something to look into. Maybe the staff isn’t serving meals as designed. Or maybe your loved one isn’t eating due to the stress of mental abuse.

If you have any reason to suspect nursing home neglect and/or abuse, it’s better to be safe than sorry. You hope that everything checks out, but you never know what you could find.

Should you identify neglect and/or abuse, talk to the staff about your concerns and then look for a new facility into which to move your loved one. From there, collect evidence and take steps to help your loved one protect their legal rights.