If you were playing a word association game, I bet you’d be hard pressed to combine nursing home patients and car accidents! While the terms may mix like oil and water in many contexts, in my world as a nursing home lawyer I frequently see the two intermixed– and the the results certainly don’t favor the patients.
In my nursing home ligation practice, I see many cases where nursing home patients are horribly injured in car accidents either as pedestrians or as passengers in vans. While most think about nursing home patients passing time in an idyllic setting, the truth is that there is a significant portion of the nursing home population that leaves the facility for their personal recreation, visit with doctors or tend to personal business.
Because auto accidents make up a significant number of accidents for nursing home patients, I plan on going into the three major categories of automobile injury cases affecting nursing home patients and the respective liability issues for both driver and nursing facility.