When someone you love gets hurt in a care facility, the first question is simple: who was supposed to be watching them?
The answer depends on the type of facility.
Georgia licenses several kinds of care settings, and each one carries different duties, different staffing rules, and different state oversight. A skilled nursing facility must provide round-the-clock nursing care. An assisted living community or personal care home offers help with daily tasks but not full medical care. Home health and hospice bring services into a person’s own home or apartment, so the facility itself may not be the one at fault.
Knowing which type of facility was responsible for your loved one’s care is the first step toward holding the right party accountable. At Wagner Hughes, LLC, our Atlanta nursing home abuse lawyers help families across Georgia sort out exactly who owed a duty of care and who broke it. Call us at 404-900-6979 or fill out our confidential contact form to talk about what happened.
Skilled Nursing Facilities: The Highest Level of Medical Care
A skilled nursing facility, often called a nursing home, is built for residents who need medical care every day. Licensed nurses are supposed to be on site around the clock.
These facilities handle wound care, medication management, feeding tubes, and rehabilitation after surgery or illness. Under federal law, every nursing home must give each resident an individual care plan and protect basic rights, like freedom from unnecessary physical restraints.
When a nursing home fails to follow that plan, the results can be serious. Bedsores, falls, dehydration, and untreated infections are common signs of neglect. Our page on pressure ulcers and bedsores walks through how these injuries develop when staff do not reposition residents often enough.
Assisted Living Communities and Personal Care Homes: A Different Standard
Georgia’s Department of Community Health licenses two smaller settings through its Healthcare Facility Regulation Division.
- Personal care homes
- Assisted living communities
A personal care home offers housing, meals, and help with daily activities, but is not built to handle medical needs. An assisted living community is a personal care home with 25 or more residents that has a higher license, letting certified medication aides give out medications and letting a nurse check on residents from time to time.
Neither setting is required to have a nurse on duty at all hours. That matters when a family is trying to figure out fault. If a resident needed skilled nursing care that the facility was never licensed to give, the harm may trace back to a bad placement decision rather than to hands-on neglect. If staff ignored a resident’s calls for help or failed basic supervision duties they were licensed to provide, that is a different kind of failure, and it still counts as neglect.
Home Health: When the Facility Is Actually a Private Company
Home health care brings nurses, aides, or therapists into a senior’s own home or apartment. There is no building to inspect and no dining hall to check for cleanliness. Responsibility instead falls on the home health agency that trained, scheduled, and supervised the worker who came through the door. If an aide skipped visits, mishandled medication, or caused an injury, the agency, not a nursing home, is usually the party a family needs to pursue.
Physical and sexual abuse can also happen in a home health setting, since there is often only one caregiver present and little outside supervision.
Hospice: A Special Kind of Care With Its Own Rules
Hospice care focuses on comfort for someone nearing the end of life, whether that person lives at home, in a nursing home, or in an assisted living community.
A hospice team is supposed to manage pain, coordinate with other caregivers, and check on the patient on a regular schedule. When a hospice team fails to show up, fails to manage pain properly, or fails to communicate with a facility’s own staff, the hospice provider can be held responsible even though the patient lived somewhere else.
This overlap is one reason nursing home cases in Georgia can get complicated fast. A resident might be in a skilled nursing facility for daily care, receiving hospice services at the same time. If something goes wrong, more than one organization may share the blame.
How to Figure Out Who Was Responsible
A few questions help narrow down which facility, or which company, owed your loved one a duty of care:
- Was the person living in a licensed facility, or receiving care at home?
- Did the harm involve a medical need the facility was licensed to handle?
- Was more than one provider involved, such as a personal care home and a hospice team?
A 2019 Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation found that understaffing was a common thread across Georgia’s senior care industry, in both nursing homes and assisted living settings. Understaffing is one of the clearest signs that a facility cut corners on the care it was licensed to provide.
Get Help Sorting Out What Happened
You do not have to figure out the licensing rules on your own. An experienced nursing home abuse attorney can review medical records, staffing logs, and state inspection reports to identify exactly which facility or company failed your loved one.
You can also report suspected abuse or neglect directly to the state, which starts an official investigation separate from any legal claim.
Contact Our Nursing Home Abuse Lawyers
At Wagner Hughes, LLC, our nursing home abuse attorneys in Georgia and nursing home abuse law firm team have recovered more than $42 million for Georgia families and handled over 1,000 cases involving nursing homes, assisted living communities, personal care homes, home health, and hospice. Call us at 404-900-6979 or fill out our confidential contact form for a free consultation. We only get paid if we win your case.