Signal Hill, California

Welcome to nursing home neglect lawyer Ben Yeroushalmi’s Signal Hill website. Our law firm, Yeroushalmi Law, focuses exclusively on litigation involving elder abuse and neglect that occurs in residential care facilities, including skilled nursing facilities, assisted living facilities, board & care homes, and hospitals. As experts in our field, we would like to offer you some insight on choosing an appropriate skilled nursing facility for your loved one.

The city of Signal Hill is a small city completely surrounded by Long Beach. Because the hill is 365 feet above the surrounding lands, the indigenous Tongva used to burn signal fires on the top of the hill, fires which could be seen all the way out to Catalina Island. Today, the city is sometimes nicknamed “Porcupine Hill”, because it is a major hotspot for oil and is covered with oil derricks, which gives it a prickly appearance. As of the 2022 census, the population of Signal Hill was 11,381. The city of Signal Hill contains one skilled nursing facility.

As specialists in the legal area of nursing home neglect, we advise you to actively keep track of your loved one’s health if he or she is a resident at a skilled nursing facility. Quality of care has declined so rapidly within nursing homes in recent times that government healthcare agencies have had to intervene and take action. Too often, nursing homes fail to provide their patients with proper care, and this sometimes has consequences as serious as death. In an attempt to reduce the amount of preventable injuries and deaths, Medicare has implemented a 'No-Pay' Rule which asserts that facilities will not receive funding to care for injuries that were acquired within the facility as a result of the facility's own failure to provide appropriate care. The Department of Health and Human Services has also initiated a similar program.

These strict new programs can be traced back to the exploitation of Medicare funds by skilled nursing facilities. Instead of using funds to increase staffing and improve quality of care, many nursing homes use their budget to improperly administer antipsychotic drugs and use them as chemical restraints to sedate patients, while collecting money from their insurance and/or private funds.

The egregious acts of Los Angeles Area skilled nursing facilities need to be stopped. One way to further this effort is to initiate lawsuits against facilities that allow their residents to suffer from abuse and neglect. Lawsuits can act as a deterrent to this unethical and immoral behavior by bringing the issues under closer public scrutiny, delivering justice to at-fault facilities, and serving as a warning to other facilities that might otherwise be inclined to cut corners when hiring staff, thus rendering their patients vulnerable to a low standard of care.

As we discuss on our understaffing page, understaffing is one of the primary causes of nursing home abuse and neglect. Even if your loved one’s caregivers are trying hard to provide high quality, complete care, if the skilled nursing facility is understaffed, the caregivers will not be able to get to all of their tasks. A Washington Post article discusses the recent use of algorithms to determine how much time is needed to complete each task in nursing homes. The algorithm would then determine how many staff needed to be hired based on the analysis of how long it takes to complete a given task. Many of the nursing homes that implemented this algorithm-based system ended up understaffing their facilities, to the severe detriment of the residents there.

Horror stories like this are the reason we fight so hard for our clients. At Yeroushalmi Law, we consider ourselves to be the vanguard when it comes to cracking down on the abuses currently running rampant in California nursing homes. Contact us today to join us in the fight against nursing home neglect and elder abuse.