Damages in Cherry Hill Nursing Home Abuse Cases

Any way that this abuse has caused a person or their loved one harm is an element of damages to incorporate. Whether that is a physical damage, injury, physical pain and suffering, mental and emotional pain, suffering and anguish, the impact it may have financially with regard to ability to work or medical bills and medical claims, all of these are elements of damages that go into play. The whole purpose of damages in Cherry Hill nursing home abuse cases is to put a person and their family in the position that they would have been if none of this occurred. Whatever that may be, from an economic and non-economic standpoint, that is the purpose of the lawsuit and those are damages that an experienced nursing home abuse lawyer will seek on behalf of those impacted.

Types of Damages

Non-economic damages are going to be a person’s pain, the suffering, the loss of enjoyment of life, and the impact that these injuries have had on a loved one and their family.

The economic losses are going to be an element of compensatory damages in Cherry Hill nursing home abuse cases that are actual economic losses that they can put a number on, lost wages, medical bills, out-of-pocket expenses, and any health insurance claims.

Punitive damages are not applicable in every case but punitive damages are meant to punish the facility. If it is proven that the facility acted grossly negligent or with a willful and reckless disregard for the safety of their patients, they may be able to seek punitive damages, which would be meant to punish the facility for their action.

Unique Aspects of Damages

A lot of times, one is dealing with elderly residents in nursing homes and most of the time, Medicare insures them. Medicare has the ability to assert a claim against a case. This means that whatever Medicare has paid, they will assert a claim against the case and they basically are piggybacking onto the nursing home abuse case.

If they have paid X amount of dollars for medical treatment related to this abuse, that amount gets added onto whatever the compensatory and punitive damages should be in a case. The Medicare claim will get added on and that needs to be paid back. Medicare is a big insurance company, funded by a federal government and an attorney will need to make sure they are protecting that claim.

Proving Nursing Home Abuse

Whenever a person has the potential to seek damages in Cherry Hill nursing home abuse cases, the first element is proving liability. This includes determining whether there was a deviation from the standard of care. The second is proving what injuries resulted from that deviation. The difficult part of the court case is the analysis determining what are the damages that have resulted.It is a case-by-case basis. Everybody is affected differently by injury. Every family is affected differently by injury. It needs to be evaluated as a whole to determine the total impact.

A person will want to hire an experienced personal injury attorney who knows how to do nursing home cases to prove these damages because there are so many different things that need to be done as far as the medical records and illustrations and demonstratives and making sure we have the right experts in place, whether those are vocational experts or economic experts.

Developing a Life Care Plan

A life care plan is basically setting up what that injured person’s medical treatment needs to be for the rest of their life and how much that is going to cost. When an injury occurs, there are times where the treatment that is needed for that injury is ongoing into the future.

In a life care plan, an experienced attorney would hire an expert who can look at all factors surrounding the injury and the person’s life, determine what treatment they need and what the cause of that treatment is going to be before putting together a detailed analysis of how much that is going to cost.

That cost of the future medical treatment would get added into what the demand for damages in Cherry Hill nursing home cases. That would fall under one of those economic losses of compensatory damages where it talks about the future cost of medical treatment. That would impact damages because it would increase the amount of damages.