Understanding Legal Challenges

4 Tips For Coping With Nursing Home Abuse

If you have a loved one who was in nursing home care and was being abused, it can be extremely hard for you to cope with. After all, if this is your parent, you feel a responsibility to protect them in their elderly age. Here are four tips to help you cope with this situation:

  1. Enroll Your Parent in Better Care: First off, you want to enroll your parent in better care. While it's difficult to ensure that nursing home abuse is not going to happen, it's much less likely if you are visiting regularly and ensuring that you speak with other patients and their children to determine whether or not the nursing home you are looking at is a good one. From here, you also want to be sure that your parent's new care is aware of their previous abuse so that any psychological or physical medical needs your parent may have as a result are treated properly in their new care. 
  2. Look for Signs of Psychological Damage: When visiting your parent from now on, you want to pay careful attention to any psychological damage from the previous abuse that they might be suffering. If you notice that your parent has become more withdrawn, has a loss of pleasure in daily activities that they once loved, and or has other new psychological problems, then you might want to look into counseling for further help. 
  3. Avoid Blame: Don't blame yourself for what has happened. Instead, praise yourself for making it better. Blaming yourself can only lead to you having a lessened desire to care for your parent, which can lead to more blame that you put on yourself. If you are feeling upset by the nursing home abuse your parent has endured, seek out support. You can talk with a nursing home abuse lawyer who can provide you references to help you find this support that you need. 
  4. Keep Contact with Lawyer: You should be keeping regular contact with the nursing home abuse lawyer to ensure that the case is progressing toward compensation for your parent. This helps with coping because you know that the person responsible for the abuse is suffering the consequences while you and your parent are able to move on from it. 

With these four tips for coping, you can be sure that the nursing home abuse doesn't completely destroy the remaining years of your parent's life or affect your own ability to help further care for your parent. For more information, talk to companies like Garrison Law Firm.