Nursing Home Neglect / Negligence
Location: Texas
I'm not even sure what my question is. I just want a legal perspective. My mom was admitted to a nursing home in January of this year. She has dementia and two terminal illnesses. The nursing home didn't give me any admission paperwork to sign, and they didn't give me any of the information Title 26 requires them to give. Since that time, they took her off of her antidepressants (no tapering) without telling her medical POA. They also took her off of her heart medication without telling her medical POA. We complained (in writing) to the director of nursing and the administrator multiple times to no avail. We only found out that they took her off of the antidepressants after we noticed a sharp decline in her mental state. To this day, they have not explained who made that decision or why. In March, she went into hospice care, still at the same nursing home. They seemed wonderful, but then we noticed that my mom was crying out in pain whenever they changed her. (She's incontinent and bed bound due to problems with her back.) Hospice did not inform us of this. We looked at her private parts when they were changing her and everything was cherry red and inflamed. We called the on-call nurse for hospice who diagnosed her with a rash. We have a camera in her room and I started a log of everything the staff did in her room going back more than a month. What I learned was that they regularly leave her in a brief for 7, 9, or 10 hours every day, and sometimes it gets as high as 12 or 16 hours. We reached out to the ombudsman (no help at all) and the hospice social worker, but he told us that he didn't want to hurt the contract with the facility. He told us not to contact a lawyer and instead to give the nursing home one more chance. He was more concerned that she wasn't getting her breathing treatments. He told us that the facility told him they stopped those treatments, again without telling the medical POA. We had an immediate care plan meeting the next day, and they told us the social worker was simply wrong about everything and we are the ones who are being unreasonable. The state is now investigating them, and the facility is now asking me to sign 30+ pages of paperwork.
Thoughts?
Edited to add: We have also not spoken to a doctor this entire time. The facility has repeatedly refused to provide us with a phone number for him, even when I read the language from Title 26 to them. They told me to Google him.