Nursing Home Abuse & Neglect

When a Nevada family places a parent or spouse in a nursing home or assisted-living facility, they are trusting that facility to provide the care its own admission paperwork promised. Most of the time that trust is honored. When it is not — when a resident develops a deep pressure wound that never should have formed, is scalded in a bath, falls because no one answered a call light, or dies of an untreated infection — the harm is rarely an accident. It is usually the predictable result of understaffing, poor training, or corner-cutting.

O'Reilly Law Group represents residents and families across Southern Nevada in serious nursing home abuse and neglect matters. These cases sit at the intersection of our personal injury and litigation practices, and Nevada gives them special force: a statute written specifically to protect older and vulnerable adults can expose a facility to enhanced damages and attorney's fees.

The pages below explain the injury patterns we see most often, what Nevada law requires of facilities, and the deadlines that govern these claims. This is general information about the law, not advice about any particular situation.

The injuries we investigate

Nursing home neglect tends to show up as a recognizable set of injuries. Each of the pages below explains how that injury happens, why it usually points to a failure of care rather than bad luck, and what a family can do about it:

• Stage 4 bedsores — the deepest pressure injuries, exposing muscle or bone.
• Sacral and coccyx wounds — pressure wounds over the tailbone, the most common site.
• Hot water and scald burns — injuries from unsafe bath and shower temperatures.
• Wounds, sepsis and infections — non-healing wounds and the infections that follow them.
• Untreated medical conditions — missed changes in condition and medication errors.
• Malnutrition and dehydration — residents who are not fed or given fluids properly.
• Falls and fractures — falls that a proper care plan should have prevented.
• Wrongful death — when neglect costs a resident their life.

What Nevada law requires of a facility

Nevada nursing homes and long-term care facilities are licensed and inspected under NRS Chapter 449 by the state's Bureau of Health Care Quality and Compliance. Facilities that accept Medicare or Medicaid must also meet the federal requirements of the Nursing Home Reform Act, codified in the regulations at 42 CFR Part 483, which guarantee residents the right to be free from abuse and neglect and to receive care that keeps them at their highest practicable level of well-being.

In practice, that means a facility must assess each resident, write and follow an individualized care plan, reposition residents at risk of pressure injury, monitor for changes in condition, prevent avoidable falls, and keep residents nourished and hydrated. When a facility documents a risk in its own records and then fails to act on it, that gap between what the chart called for and what was actually done is often the heart of the case.

Nevada's protection for older and vulnerable adults

Nevada treats harm to older and vulnerable adults more seriously than ordinary negligence. Under NRS 41.1395, a person who suffers injury or death as a proximate result of abuse, neglect, or exploitation while a vulnerable person or an older person — generally age 60 or older — may recover up to two times the amount of actual damages, and a prevailing plaintiff may recover attorney's fees. That enhanced-damages provision changes the calculus for facilities that treat safe staffing as an optional expense.

Separate criminal statutes, NRS 200.5092 to 200.5099, define elder abuse and neglect and make it a crime, and Nevada requires many professionals to report suspected abuse of an older person. A criminal or regulatory finding is not the same as a civil case, but the records those processes generate can matter a great deal to a family's claim.

How these cases are built

A nursing home case is a documents case before it is anything else. The facility's own records — the care plan, the nursing notes, the wound-care flow sheets, the repositioning logs, the medication administration record, and the incident reports — usually tell the story of what was supposed to happen and what did. We work to preserve those records early, before they can be lost or altered, and to read them against the medical reality of the injury. State inspection surveys and the facility's staffing data often add context about whether a problem was isolated or chronic.

Because a serious injury to an older resident can involve overlapping medical-negligence and abuse-and-neglect theories, the deadlines are not one-size-fits-all. Getting the analysis right early is part of the work.

Terms you may hear

Pressure injury (bedsore)

Damage to skin and underlying tissue caused by sustained pressure, usually over a bony area; graded in stages by depth.

Care plan

The individualized written plan a facility must create and follow for each resident, covering their specific risks and needs.

Vulnerable person

Under Nevada law, a person with a physical or mental limitation that restricts their ability to carry out normal activities or protect themselves.

Enhanced damages

Under NRS 41.1395, damages that may be doubled when injury results from abuse, neglect, or exploitation of an older or vulnerable person.