Studies have shown somewhere between one and two million cases of abuse happen to Americans age 65 and over every single year here in America. Let’s talk about it a little bit.
Video Transcript
Hello, this is Darrell Castle. I’m an attorney licensed to practice law in the state of Tennessee and on this video today, I’m talking about nursing home abuse in Tennessee and really nursing home abuse in America because studies have shown somewhere between one and two million cases of abuse happen to Americans age 65 and over every single year here in America.
Nursing home abuse is similar to medical malpractice in one sense in that the laws require a similar level of proof and similar level of testimony from expert witnesses – meaning doctors and so forth – in both cases. But they are different in one sense.
Let’s say for example that you took an elderly person – say 85 years old – and through a doctor’s mistake, a doctor’s negligence – that person was injured, or even killed and died as a result of it. Well the fact of the matter is, it sounds cold but an 85 year old person has no economic aspect to their life. They’re just not worth very much, economically speaking.
But that is not true in nursing home cases because in nursing home cases, that 85-year-old person did not die or become injured because of somebody’s mistake – somebody’s negligence. Instead, that person died or became injured due to an intentional act of deprivation, of abuse. Those things can be physical abuse. They can be broken arms, legs, hips and so forth. They can be financial abuse. Nursing home folks can steal from the patience or do other things to abuse them financially – exploit them financially. Sometimes it can even be sexual abuse. Those things are all terrible and they’re all intentional. And they all involve, essentially, physical pain, mental suffering – all things that nobody, elderly or not, should have to suffer and these are things that are done to the most vulnerable among us.
So, they really should be addressed and the only way to do that is through an investigation and you can get examples of what you think nursing home cases investigated free just by seeing a good lawyer experienced in doing that.