La Canada Flintridge, California

Welcome to the La Canada Flintridge website for the Law Offices of Ben Yeroushalmi. We hope this website will provide you with insight to Los Angeles nursing homes, which are often guilty of many types of abuses to their residents, such as understaffing and neglect.

La Canada Flintridge is a city located in the San Gabriel Valley. The city features a 150-acre botanical garden called Descanso Gardens. Prior to the cities incorporation in 1976, the city was actually divided into two separate communities: La Canada and Flintridge. When the communities were unified, the names were combined, specifically without a hyphen, as a symbol of unity. Although there are no skilled nursing facilities in La Canada Flintridge, you can find one close to your home at this website.

One of the most apparent signs of nursing home neglect and elder abuse is when your loved one’s facility refuses to let you see his or her medical records. The Department of Health and Human Services, which has implemented and enforced the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), has expressed concern about this issue of concealing medical records. Although HIPAA was created to protect patients’ privacy, many health care facilities use it to protect themselves from liability by refusing a patient access to his or her own medical records. In response to this problem, the Office of Civil Rights division of the Department of Health and Human Services has issued a Right to Access Memorandum that provides a comprehensive one page document that you can take with you to your health care provider to support your demand for immediate access to your medical records.

Even when a nursing home facility is open and cooperative in giving you access to medical records, you must be cautious. Documentation of care does not necessarily indicate that proper care is actually being provided. Falsifying of medical records is another common issue in nursing homes that must be addressed. Many government organizations base the amount of funding that a facility receives on the nursing home’s quality rating. Medicare has also implemented a ‘No-Pay’ Rule, which relieves itself from paying for avoidable injuries that are acquired within a facility, such as pressure ulcers, which are preventable with proper care and treatment. Because nursing homes have incentives to hide certain injuries, it is extremely important that you assess your loved one’s health yourself, and closely monitor the care that he or she is receiving.

We hope that this website has familiarized you with some of the legal rights that patients have. If you feel that your loved one’s nursing home is violating his or her rights, contact us today for a free consultation.