You may have a relative in a New Mexico nursing home and are not satisfied with how the home is caring for your loved one. You might even be considering legal action on the basis of mistreatment. To help reveal possible problems with your loved one’s care, asking the home for your relative’s record is a vital move. According to The Expert Institute, there are a number of things you and your attorney should be aware of concerning a nursing home record.
First, a resident’s nursing home record is almost certainly going to be long. Even residents who stay at a nursing home for a short time, usually to rehabilitate before moving back to their regular residence, can generate a record of several hundred pages. So you can imagine that a resident who has stayed at a nursing home for years will possess a very large file.
A nursing home record will contain a lot of different information. While the exact subjects contained in a file may vary, you should expect to find information such as care plans, recent hospital stays, admission documentation, physician orders, and medication records. You also should find information concerning risk assessments, such as your loved one’s fall risk or risk of a health malady such as urinary tract infection or dehydration.
However, your loved one’s file may not be well organized. Many companies usually have specialized records departments to organize and store documents, but this is not the case for many nursing homes. In fact, a lot of nursing homes do not have a particular employee that handles the records. So when you request your loved one’s file, you may end up with lots of disorganized pages.
You should also expect that your loved one’s record might not be organized with the oldest information on top. Some nursing homes will stack the most recent documents on top of the file. So if you are looking for older information, you may have to dig through the papers in the record to find it. Some individuals ask for an attorney to help organize a file if it too cumbersome and disordered.
There will be a lot of questions you may have regarding your loved one’s nursing home record, which a professional nursing home neglect attorney can assist you with. Because nursing home records are a complex matter, do not read this article as legal advice for your situation. Only read it for your educational benefit.