Maison Law can help you and your family through the wrongful death claims process if negligent supervision led to the death of a loved one in a California nursing home. Placing your loved one in the care of a nursing home is hard enough as it is, but when a preventable accident happens because the facility or its staff failed to do what they’re supposed to do, it’s all the more difficult. We can help your family through it all. Set up a free consultation today.
Should My Family Talk to a Lawyer?
In the days and weeks following the loss of your loved one in a California nursing home, you’re likely not focused on getting a lawyer. You’re rightly focused on your family and getting affairs in order. But the more information you start putting together about the role the nursing home’s supervision played in the death, the harder things start to become.
These types of situations usually aren’t as simple as pointing to one mistake or one employee. It often takes digging through records, talking to witnesses, and figuring out whether the nursing home followed the care plan your loved one needed. With everything else going on, it’s easy to see why talking to our team can be helpful. Once you decide to sit down with us, we’ll:
- Explain your family’s legal options
- Put in a full investigation how your loved one’s death happened
- Gather medical records, incident reports, and other evidence
- Look into staffing levels, supervision policies, and the facility’s history
- Deal with the nursing home and its insurance company
- Go to court with a wrongful death lawsuit, if that’s what it takes
More than anything, we want to take some of the legal burden off your family so you can focus on each other. And as you might expect, these types of cases rest on information that can be hard to cobble together.
Information That Can Help Uncover Negligent Supervision in a Nursing Home
A lot of families take supervision of their loved one for granted when they have to place them into the care of a nursing home. This is partly due to the fact that most nursing homes—as well as other care facilities— promise 24/7 supervision. Normally, they do this by making sure staffing ratios and security are up to code. But unfortunately, there’s everyday situations that make supervision an issue.
If that’s what you suspect led to your loved one’s death, it’s important to get some basic information like:
- Pictures or videos of the room, hallway, or area where the incident happened.
- Medical records from the nursing home, paramedics, or hospital.
- Names and contact information for staff members, residents, visitors, or anyone who may have witnessed what happened.
- Emails, letters, text messages, or other communication between your family and the nursing home.
The good news is you don’t have to find everything yourself. That’s part of our job. We can work to get records that nursing homes don’t always hand over voluntarily, including:
- Incident reports explaining what staff saw and how they responded.
- Your loved one’s care plan showing the level of supervision they were supposed to receive.
- Staffing schedules that show whether enough employees were working that day.
- Surveillance footage, if cameras captured the incident.
- Internal emails or notes showing whether staff knew about safety concerns beforehand.
- Training records that show whether employees were properly prepared to care for residents.
When you put all of this together, it often becomes much easier to see whether the nursing home simply made an unavoidable mistake—or whether it failed to provide the supervision your loved one needed.
Understanding Negligent Supervision in a Nursing Home Setting
Every nursing home has a legal responsibility to keep its residents reasonably safe—whether they advertise it or not. That includes supervision that’s adjusted based on the resident’s
- Overall medical condition
- Age
- Mobility
Even with these legal requirements, nursing homes are still businesses. This means that they don’t always prioritize your loved one and other residents. They’re more worried about the nursing home’s bottom line. And unfortunately, negligent supervision is one of the byproducts of this. Normally, that shows up as:
- Not keeping a close enough eye on residents who need regular monitoring because of falls, dementia, or other medical conditions.
- Leaving someone unattended when they should have been receiving assistance or supervision.
- Ignoring warning signs that a resident’s condition was getting worse or that something wasn’t right.
- Failing to step in when a resident clearly needed help, whether during a medical emergency or an everyday activity.
- Not following the resident’s care plan, even though it outlined the supervision they required.
- Allowing unsafe conditions to continue instead of fixing problems before someone got hurt.
- Hiring unqualified employees or failing to properly train and supervise staff responsible for resident care.
- Failing to prevent abuse, neglect, or other dangerous situations that could have been avoided.
So yes, this covers a lot of different types of scenarios. But the common thread is that your loved one needed certain supervision that the nursing home and its staff was legally required to provide. And if that leads to your loved one’s death, you have the building blocks of a wrongful death claim.
How a Nursing Home Could Be Liable for Negligent Supervision
When your loved one dies because they weren’t properly supervised at their nursing home, it usually means something went wrong behind the scenes. The difficult part is figuring out exactly where that breakdown happened and who is responsible. To simplify things, it’s helpful to ask this question:
- Who had the responsibility to protect your loved one, and how did they fail to do it?
What this is in legal terms is negligence, and it’s the legal standard of liability. In this kind of situation, liability for your loved one’s death could fall on:
- The nursing home itself if it failed to provide the supervision residents reasonably needed.
- The company that owns or manages the facility if decisions about staffing, training, or policies contributed to what happened.
- Administrators or supervisors who failed to make sure residents were being properly monitored.
- Nurses, caregivers, or other staff members who didn’t provide the care or supervision your loved one required.
- Doctors or other healthcare providers if their actions or lack of communication contributed to the situation.
- Outside contractors if another company responsible for providing services at the facility played a role in your loved one’s death.
Many wrongful death cases uncover bigger problems than a single mistake. Basically, there’s a lot that comes together to factor in. But once you have negligence, you and your family can go forward with a wrongful death claim.
What Damages Can My Family Get in a Wrongful Death Claim?
Legally speaking, a wrongful death claim is still an injury claim. But because your loved one has passed away, the law works a little differently. Only certain people can bring the claim, including:
- A surviving spouse or registered domestic partner.
- Other qualifying family members in certain situations.
- In some cases, a representative of your loved one’s estate.
Once that’s sorted out, your family can usually move forward with either an insurance claim or a wrongful death lawsuit. This brings you to the other major difference with a wrongful death claim: damages. Normally, you and your family can recover costs related to thins like:
- Medical expenses related to your loved one’s final care.
- Funeral and burial expenses.
- Lost financial support.
- The loss of companionship, guidance, care, and emotional support.
- The loss of household services your loved one provided.
- In some cases, additional damages through a survival action for losses your loved one suffered before passing away.
Remember, there’s only two years from the date of death to file a wrongful death lawsuit. That may seem like plenty of time, but evidence doesn’t always stick around that long. Staffing logs, surveillance footage, internal reports, and other records can disappear if they’re not preserved early, which is one of the reasons it’s helpful to start looking into your legal options sooner rather than later.
Let Maison Law Help Your Family Find Answers
Losing a loved one in a nursing home is devastating. Finding out their death may have happened because they weren’t being watched or cared for in the way they should have can make that loss even harder to process.
At Maison Law, we help families throughout California get answers, investigate what really happened, and hold nursing homes accountable when negligence leads to a preventable death. If you have questions about your family’s legal options, set up a free consultation today. We’ll listen to your story, explain what comes next, and help you decide the best path forward.
