People involved in legal disputes may choose, instead of litigation, to submit their case to a process like mediation, where a neutral person tries to help all sides in a dispute reach a mutually agreeable settlement; or arbitration, where one or more neutral individuals hear arguments from all sides to…
A woman may replead her lawsuit against a Tennessee nursing home for the death of her mother as an ordinary negligence claim, according to a ruling from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Southwell v. Summit View of Farragut. She filed suit claiming medical malpractice and violations of the…
A Baltimore nursing home announced that it will shut its doors by the end of September 2012. The nursing home’s parent company, Ravenwood Healthcare, Inc. of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. The facility lost its Medicare and Medicaid funding, and Ravenwood has been unsuccessful in locating…
A nursing home in Greenwood, Mississippi could lose all of its funding through the Medicare and Medicaid programs if it fails to correct certain problems alleged by the federal government. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency that administers both programs, recently notified Greenwood’s Golden Age…
A California appeals court has reinstated a putative class action lawsuit filed by patients at sixteen nursing homes located in Alameda County. The defendants in Shuts v. Covenant Holdco, LLC, et al are related business entities that own and operate the homes. The plaintiffs allege various violations of state regulations…
A former nursing home operator received a twenty-year prison sentence from a federal district judge in Atlanta, Georgia on August 14, 2012. George Houser, age 64, was convicted in April of defrauding state Medicare and Medicaid programs. As a result of the fraudulent scheme, nursing home residents went without adequate…
A former executive with a nursing home company based in Roanoke, Virginina has been sentenced to just over five years in prison after pleading guilty to multiple counts involving mail fraud and tax evasion. He was accused of receiving more than half a million dollars in kickbacks from contractors, awarding…
An unusually high number of cases of nursing home residents choking to death in Connecticut has led to calls for improved training for staff members. The state has fined three nursing homes in three unrelated choking deaths, all occurring within a period of three months. In each incident, nursing home…
A federal lawsuit brought by the parents of several students against a Kansas military school alleges multiple acts of abuse and neglect. Although fellow students committed many of the alleged acts of abuse, the lawsuit claims that adult staff members often knew about the abuse, and that some were even…
A nursing home in Iowa must pay a $15,000 fine for failing to provide needed treatment to a resident who fell and suffered a head injury. The resident reportedly lay on the floor for almost an hour while staffers attended a holiday party nearby. Nursing home administrators say they plan…