Nursing home residents and their families rely on the facility’s staff to care for them. It is hard work that requires training and experience to do correctly. A high-quality staff is one of the things most Georgia families look for when shopping for a long-term care facility.
Hiring standards in nursing homes can be a matter of life and death. Having your car worked on by an incompetent mechanic can be annoying and expensive. But a negligent or abusive nurse or other staff member can harm a resident’s health, even kill them.
Strict hiring and training laws
When abuse or neglect occurs at a nursing home, its management and ownership could be partly to blame because they hired the person responsible. State law sets out several rules for hiring and training nursing home staff. For example:
- The facility must obtain a criminal background check on potential new hires, and the applicant must provide their employment history.
- All staff members must be at least 18 years old, and on-site managers and supervisors must be at least 21.
- Within 60 days of hiring, new staff must undergo training on their job duties, residents’ rights and identification of conducting constituting abuse, neglect or exploitation.
A facility that violates these or related regulations could be guilty of negligent hiring. For example, say a facility hires someone but does not conduct a thorough background check that would have revealed two arrests for domestic violence. If that staff member later abuses a resident, the victim’s family could argue that the facility should never have hired them and that the lack of background check was negligent.
Because negligent hiring practices by a long-term care facility can lead to tragedy, victims and their families can pursue compensation from the facility for its indirect involvement.