New York Personal Injury Attorneys Blog

Financial abuse or financial exploitation of the elderly is unfortunately all too common in nursing homes or elderly facilities. According to the National Center on Elder Abuse, Bureau of Justice Statistics, financial abuse represents approximately 12% of reported elder abuse cases.

Stephanie Benodin, a former personal care assistant at The Tuttle Center, a life care retirement community that is part of The Amsterdam at Harborside in Port Washington, N.Y admitted that she took the checkbook of her victim an 88 year old resident of the nursing home and wrote a check of $10K in the name of her mother. She then deposited the check in her mother’s account but it was returned for insufficient funds.The 26-year-old Queens resident pleaded guilty to Attempted Grand Larceny in the Fourth Degree in Nassau County District Court before Judge Susan T. Kluewer. Sentencing is set for April 9.

See Press Release

A fight between residents in a NYC nursing home lead to the death of one of them. Heraldo Gonzalds 56, a resident of the New Gloria’s Manor Home for Adults, in Belle Arbor, Queens, New York was beaten so severely by 54 year old Bienvenido Cruz, another resident, that he was transferred to a hospital and died of his injuries several days after the fight. (see New York Daily News)

New York Nursing home staff do not seem to be prepared to handle cases of residents being abused by other residents. A few months ago in a previous blog we wrote about another fight in a Queens nursing home that also ended with the death of one of the patients.

With a growing number of the older population suffering from Alzheimer, dementia or traumatic stress disorder, residents of nursing homes can be at risk of other residents violence. It is very difficult to know exactly the extend of this type of abuse because only fights resulting in severe injury or death are reported.

Unnecessary use of antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs by nursing homes has lead to abuse and has been a preoccupation of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) for many years. A proposal for a new rule to modify access to antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs was published by the CMS last month. The CMS proposes to eliminate the antidepressant drugs and some immunosuppressant drugs from the list of protective classes by the beginning of 2015. The antipsychotic drugs would be removed from the protected list a year after to facilitate medication transition for people taking these drugs. While some believe that this change of policy would reduce the overuse and misuse of antipsychotic drugs by nursing homes others believe that unnecessary change of antipsychotic drugs in a patient can have very negative consequences for his or her health. What do you think?

The CMS is accepting comments on this proposal until March 7th 2014.

Read more in Annals of Long Term Care