When families hire home health aides, they're making a crucial decision about their loved one's care and safety.
These professional caregivers are supposed to provide dedicated one-on-one attention, help with daily activities, and ensure proper medical care. When a home health aide shirks these essential duties or abuses the senior, the consequences can be life-altering.
Our firm is committed to holding abusive and negligent caregivers and agencies accountable while helping families secure the compensation they need for proper medical care and recovery.
We understand that the prospect of taking legal action against a home health aide or agency can be daunting. Our knowledgeable team will handle every aspect of your case, from gathering medical records to negotiating with insurance companies, so your family can focus on healing.
With decades of experience in elder abuse cases across the Bay Area, we know how to build strong claims that get results.
Broadly speaking, a home health aide is any professional caregiver who supports elderly or disabled individuals in their homes. However, it's important to understand their specific role and duties.
Common tasks home health aides help with include:
Unlike registered nurses or licensed medical professionals who provide medical treatment, home health aides focus on helping with daily living activities. While they may need certain certifications, their primary purpose is to assist with everyday tasks that their charge can no longer manage independently due to age, disability, or health conditions.
Home health aides provide essential support that allows elderly and disabled individuals to maintain their independence at home. Rather than facing the emotional and physical challenges of moving to a nursing facility, seniors can receive personalized care in familiar surroundings, often improving their quality of life.
With nursing home costs rising dramatically each year, home health aides frequently offer a more cost-effective solution for the family members of older and disabled adults. This allows them to focus on their careers with the assurance that their loved ones will receive proper care and supervision.
As the population ages and more seniors choose in-home care, ensuring quality service will become even more critical. When trusted caregivers neglect their duties, taking legal action can help protect both your loved one and other vulnerable seniors who depend on these essential services.
Throughout her career representing Bay Area families, attorney Susan Kang Gordon has accumulated a wealth of experience handling various forms of home health aide abuse and negligence. Each case is unique, but certain patterns appear frequently in home care settings:
While home health aides are meant to protect vulnerable seniors, some inflict direct physical harm through hitting, pushing, improper restraint, or excessive force during transfers. These actions often leave visible injuries but can sometimes go undetected without careful observation.
The intimate nature of home health care creates opportunities for psychological mistreatment. Some aides who hold power over basic daily needs may exploit their position through verbal abuse, manipulation, or intimidation.
Seniors receiving home care, especially those with cognitive impairments, face an elevated risk of sexual abuse. These crimes often go unreported because victims may be unable to communicate what happened or may not understand the nature of the abuse.
Some abusive aides maintain control by cutting their clients off from family and friends. They may screen calls, block visits, intercept mail, or give excuses why the senior can't communicate with others. This isolation not only enables further abuse but also causes severe emotional trauma and depression in elderly victims.
Home health aides serve as a crucial link between your loved one and emergency medical care. When they fail to recognize medical emergencies like strokes, heart attacks, or injuries and call 911, the delay in treatment can have catastrophic consequences.
Falls are among the most serious threats to elderly individuals under home care. Your loved one's home health aide has one primary responsibility: to monitor and assist them with daily activities, including walking and transferring. When they’re distracted or absent or fail to provide proper assistance, devastating falls can occur.
Proper medication management is often a key responsibility of home health aides. Mistakes like missed doses, incorrect medications, or improper administration can lead to serious complications. We pursue cases where medication errors have caused significant harm.
When aides fail to ensure proper nutrition and hydration, elderly patients can rapidly decline. This includes not assisting with meals, ignoring dietary restrictions, failing to monitor fluid intake, and not reporting eating problems to healthcare providers.
Many elderly individuals have difficulty swallowing or require special diets to prevent choking. Home health aides must carefully monitor mealtimes and ensure proper food preparation. When aides leave vulnerable seniors unattended during meals or ignore dietary restrictions, the results can be fatal.
Sometimes, families are left with troubling questions about their loved one's sudden decline or unexpected death under home health care. Warning signs might include inconsistent explanations from the aide about what happened, missing or altered care documentation, and reluctance to provide details about the deceased's final hours.
Identifying abuse or neglect by a home health aide requires vigilant attention to both physical and behavioral changes in your loved one. While some signs may be subtle, others can indicate serious ongoing mistreatment. Here are a few things to look for:
Bruises in various stages of healing, especially on the arms or wrists, may be a sign of rough handling or physical abuse.
These painful wounds develop when an aide fails to regularly reposition a bed-bound senior.
Broken bones, particularly in multiple stages of healing, may suggest repeated falls from lack of supervision or direct physical abuse. Be particularly wary if the aide's explanations seem inconsistent.
Rapid weight changes, sunken cheeks, or constant hunger could mean the aide isn't providing proper meals or assistance with eating. Dehydration often accompanies these signs.
Withdrawal from favored activities, unusual fearfulness, or sudden agitation around the aide may signal emotional abuse or other mistreatment. If your loved one's personality seems to have changed abruptly, trust your instincts.
Unwashed hair, dirty clothes, strong odors, or a generally unkempt appearance can all suggest that the aide is neglecting their basic care responsibilities.
Home health aides operate in an environment of minimal supervision with almost unlimited access to vulnerable seniors. While essential for proper care, this intimate caregiving relationship can create opportunities for abuse when oversight is lacking.
Many cases of negligence stem from systemic problems within home health agencies themselves. In their rush to meet growing demand, some agencies cut corners on:
Sadly, failing to properly vet, train, and monitor home health aides can result in bad actors slipping through the cracks.
Home health agencies are responsible for ensuring the safety and well-being of their clients. When they fail to meet their obligations, they can be held accountable for negligence and abuse. This includes situations where agencies hire unqualified staff, fail to provide adequate training and/or supervision, assign too many clients to a single aide, or refuse to address complaints.
If you or a loved one has been a victim of neglect or abuse by a home health agency, it's important to seek qualified legal advice.
When families come to us with suspicions of home health aide abuse or neglect, they often feel overwhelmed and unsure where to begin. Our legal team provides clear guidance through every step of the process, starting with these crucial elements:
Successful abuse and negligence claims often involve multiple responsible parties, not just the individual caregiver. We thoroughly investigate all potential defendants, including the agencies that employed the aide, their supervisory staff, and various related insurance providers.
While many families worry that individual aides lack the resources to provide meaningful compensation, we work hard to identify all possible sources of recovery. This may include agency insurance policies, umbrella coverage, and corporate assets that can help secure the compensation your loved one needs.
Building a strong case requires comprehensive evidence and meticulous documentation. Our team conducts exhaustive investigations, obtaining and analyzing medical records, interviewing witnesses who observed the aide's care practices, and consulting medical experts who can testify about proper care standards.
We document all injuries through detailed photographs and medical reports, thoroughly review the aide's credentials and training history, and file reports with the proper state agencies. This thorough approach to evidence gathering helps us build compelling cases that often lead to successful pre-litigation settlements.
In California, time is of the essence when pursuing a home health aide abuse or neglect case. Generally, you have two years from the date of the incident to file a personal injury claim. If the abuse or neglect resulted in wrongful death, the surviving family members typically have two years from the date of death to take legal action.
Don't wait to seek legal help — over time, critical evidence can disappear and witness’s memories can fade, potentially weakening your case.
Victims of care-related abuse or neglect may be entitled to various forms of compensation, including:
When negligent behavior leads to death, families can seek additional damages for funeral expenses, loss of companionship, and other wrongful death-related costs. Our firm will work diligently to document all losses and secure maximum compensation for the harm your loved one has suffered.
As a recipient of the Trial Lawyer of the Year award from the San Francisco and Ventura County Trial Lawyers Associations (2022, 2021), Susan Kang Gordon brings powerful advocacy to home health aide cases. Unlike general practice firms, our team focuses exclusively on protecting seniors from caregiving abuse and neglect.
This dedicated focus gives us many crucial advantages. We understand that negligent care often reveals deeper problems with agency oversight, inadequate background checks, and profit-driven decisions that put seniors at risk. We know exactly where to look for evidence of systematic failures.
Your loved one isn't just another case file to us — they're someone's parent or grandparent who deserved proper care but received unspeakable treatment instead. We take it as a personal mission to right that wrong.
