Fort Lauderdale Nursing Home Abuse Lawyer
You trusted a facility with your mother or your father, and now there are bruises, bedsores or a fall nobody called you about. We can take it from here. Call 954-522-5800 for a free consultation. You pay us nothing unless we win. Our Fort Lauderdale personal injury lawyers have taken these cases across Broward County since 1993.
Nursing Home Abuse claims in Fort Lauderdale
The home will describe it as an accident, and the records that would say otherwise are the ones it keeps itself. Meanwhile you are deciding whether to move them, paying for care you have already paid for once, and getting nothing straight from anyone. Getting those records and an honest account is our job, and it starts the day you call.
Broward carries one of the densest concentrations of long-term care beds in Florida, and ownership here is layered in a way that decides the case before any medical question is reached. Florida limits this claim to the licensee, its management or consulting company, its managing employees and direct caregivers, and says in the same section that a passive investor is not liable. At a great many Broward facilities the licensee, the management company and the property company are three separate entities, and operators run several homes under separate limited companies. Which entity held the license on the date is a public record, and it is checked before anything else.
Broward nursing home claims are filed in the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit. Florida limits who can be sued to the licensee, its management company, managing employees and direct caregivers, so establishing which entity holds the license comes first. Most claims must be filed within two years.
What to do after a nursing home abuse in Fort Lauderdale
- Photograph everything on the body, today. Bruising, skin tears, pressure sores, restraint marks, weight loss, an untreated wound. Photograph with a date visible and from more than one angle, and photograph again in a week so the progression is recorded rather than described. A pressure sore that reaches the bone did not appear overnight, and photographs taken a week apart show that better than any argument.
- Request the complete chart in writing. Not a summary and not the parts somebody selects for you. Ask for the full record including nursing notes, the care plan and every revision to it, medication administration records, wound care notes, weights, fall reports and the incident reports. Do it in writing so the request has a date on it, and do it before anybody knows a lawyer is involved.
- Report it to the state and keep the reference. Florida runs a central abuse hotline for vulnerable adults and the agency licenses and inspects these facilities. Making a report does not replace a claim and does not slow one down, and the investigation file that results is frequently the most useful document anybody produces. Keep whatever number you are given.
- Write down the staffing you actually saw. How many staff on the floor, at what hours, and how long call bells went unanswered. Dates and times, even approximate, are what match or contradict the roster the facility later produces.
- Do not sign anything the facility puts in front of you. Not a revised admission agreement, not an arbitration agreement offered after the fact, not a release attached to a waived bill. Admission paperwork in this industry frequently contains an arbitration clause, and whether one is enforceable turns on who signed it and what authority they had. That is worth a conversation before a signature rather than after.
- Move them if they are not safe. The claim is never a reason to leave somebody where they are being hurt. Getting them out, to another facility or to a hospital, comes first and does not weaken anything. A transfer creates its own record: an admitting examination somewhere else, documenting the condition on the day they left, which is frequently the single most powerful piece of evidence in the file.
Where these claims come from in Fort Lauderdale
Broward carries one of the densest concentrations of long-term care beds in Florida, and ownership here is unusually layered.
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Skilled nursing facilities
The traditional nursing home, where the chart is detailed and the failures are documented in it.
- Turning schedules written into a care plan and not carried out
- Falls in residents already assessed as high risk on admission
- Weights recorded monthly, showing a loss over months nobody acted on
- Medication administration records, where a missed dose is a gap on the page
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Assisted living facilities
A lighter regulatory regime and residents who frequently need more than the facility is staffed to give.
- Residents who have declined past what the facility is licensed to handle
- Medication assistance by staff who are not licensed to administer it
- Wandering from a facility with no working door alarm
- Whether the resident should have been transferred and was kept instead
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Memory care units
Secured units where supervision is the entire service being sold.
- Elopement from a unit whose doors or alarms had failed
- Resident-on-resident assault at a facility that knew about the behavior
- Chemical restraint used for the convenience of staff
- Staffing ratios on the unit against what its own assessments called for
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Ownership that is deliberately hard to trace
The recurring obstacle in Broward, and the reason the first work is corporate rather than medical.
- A licensee, a management company and a property company that are three different entities
- Operators running several facilities under separate limited companies
- A passive investor, who Florida says is not liable, used as a shield
- Which entity held the license on the date is a public record and is checked first
What causes them
- Staffing levels that fell below what the residents on that floor actually needed
- Turning and repositioning schedules written into a care plan and not carried out
- Pressure sores that were allowed to develop, then allowed to reach bone
- Falls in a resident already assessed as a falls risk, with no intervention put in place
- Dehydration and malnutrition, recorded as weight loss over months that nobody acted on
- Medication given late, given twice, or not given at all
- Infections left untreated until they reached sepsis
What neglect actually looks like
Pressure sores, which are the ones that tell the whole story
A pressure injury develops because somebody was not moved. That is the entire mechanism, and it is why these wounds are treated as a marker of neglect rather than as bad luck. Facilities are expected to assess the risk, write a turning schedule into the care plan and carry it out, and the chart either shows that or it does not.
A sore that reaches muscle or bone took weeks. What matters is what the notes recorded during those weeks, and whether anybody escalated.
Falls, and the assessment that preceded them
Almost every resident who falls was already assessed as a falls risk, because that assessment is routine on admission. The question is what the facility did with it: bed alarms, low beds, mats, supervision at transfer, a physiotherapy referral. A fracture in a resident assessed as high risk with nothing put in place is a documented failure rather than an accident.
Dehydration and malnutrition
Recorded in weights taken monthly, so a loss happening over months is visible in the chart to anybody who reads it in order. Families are frequently told it is age or appetite. Where a resident needed help to eat and there was nobody to help them, that is a staffing failure with a paper trail behind it.
What Florida law requires you to prove
Residents have rights written into the statute
The full scheme, the presuit process and the notice requirements sit on our Florida nursing home abuse page rather than being restated in each market. The short version is that Florida writes a list of residents’ rights into chapter 400 and creates a civil action for violating them, which is a different claim from ordinary negligence and is frequently the stronger one.
Who can actually be sued, which is narrower than people expect
Fla. Stat. § 400.023 makes this an exclusive cause of action that may be brought against the licensee, the licensee’s management or consulting company, its managing employees and any direct caregivers, whether employees or contractors. The same section says a passive investor is not liable. Establishing which entity actually holds the license, and which company manages it, is therefore the first piece of work in every one of these files.
The facility had to write it down, and had to report it
Fla. Stat. § 400.147 requires an internal risk management program with a named risk manager and an incident reporting system staff have an affirmative duty to use, and Fla. Stat. § 415.1034 requires anybody who suspects a vulnerable adult is being abused or neglected to report it immediately. A serious injury with no report is itself a finding.
The full statutory detail, and the parts that differ by claim type, sit on our statewide nursing home abuse page rather than being restated in every market.
How we prove it in Broward County
These files are won out of the chart and the staffing records, and both sit with the facility until somebody asks properly.
- The complete chart, requested in writing: nursing notes, care plan and every revision, medication records, wound care notes, weights and fall reports
- Incident reports, and the absence of one where a serious injury occurred
- Staffing schedules, timesheets and agency invoices for the relevant weeks
- State inspection and complaint history for the facility, including any repeat deficiency
- The admitting record from wherever the resident went next, which documents their condition on the day they left
- Dated photographs of wounds, bruising and weight loss, taken more than once
- The licensee, the management company and the managing employees identified separately
- The admission agreement, including any arbitration clause and who signed it
Request the complete chart in writing before anybody knows a lawyer is involved. A request with a date on it, made early, is what makes a later gap in the records mean something.
Who would handle your case
Being hurt in Fort Lauderdale is hard enough without working out the legal side on your own. The trial lawyers below have handled nursing home abuse claims across Florida since 1993, and one of them will take yours from the first call to the last check. They will tell you what your case is worth and why, and they will be straight with you about the parts that are hard.
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Richard P. Pravato Founding & Managing Attorney Board Certified in Civil Trial Law by The Florida Bar since 2004, and by the National Board of Trial Advocacy. Injury cases exclusively since 1996. Full profile → -
Brett J. Yonon Senior Trial Attorney Selected to Florida Super Lawyers in 2024 and 2025. Nearly two decades in Florida courts, including a $3.5 million funeral home negligence verdict. Full profile →
What the facility and its insurer will say
The response in these files is unusually consistent, and it starts from the position that the resident was old and was going to decline anyway.
- This is what happens as people age
- Aging does not produce a pressure sore that reaches bone, and it does not answer a call bell. Decline is expected and documented; a wound that developed because nobody turned somebody is a different thing and the chart distinguishes them. The care plan says what was supposed to happen and the notes say what did.
- The family signed an arbitration agreement
- Frequently they did, buried in admission paperwork signed on the worst day of a family’s year. Whether it binds anybody turns on who signed it, what authority they actually held over the resident’s affairs, and what the document says. It is challenged rather than accepted, and it is one of the first things read in these files.
- We were fully staffed that day
- Then there are timesheets, agency invoices and a schedule, and those either match what the family saw or they do not. Staffing records are among the first documents requested, and a facility running below what its own assessments called for is a documented failure rather than an impression.
What a claim can include
Medical care caused by the neglect
Wound care, surgery, hospital admissions, rehabilitation and the treatment that would not have been needed had the care plan been followed.
Pain, suffering and loss of dignity
The largest part of most of these claims, and the part a facility prices lowest in an early offer.
The cost of moving somewhere safe
A transfer to another facility, and the difference in cost where the alternative was more expensive.
Why Wolf & Pravato in Fort Lauderdale
A Broward nursing home claim is filed in the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit at the Broward County Courthouse, and this firm has been on West Commercial Boulevard since 1993. Where a licensee, a management company and a property company are three different entities, working out which of them is answerable is corporate research done locally and done first.
Richard Pravato has been Board Certified in Civil Trial law by The Florida Bar since 2004. The Bar lists 861 lawyers in the state holding it against a membership over 109,000. What it means in practice is that the other side knows the file can go in front of a jury, and files that can go to trial are priced differently from files that cannot.
The first conversation is free. We are paid out of the recovery or not at all, and if we do not think there is a claim worth bringing we will tell you that rather than take it.
Fort Lauderdale nursing home abuse questions
We signed an arbitration agreement when she was admitted.
Most families did, buried in admission paperwork signed on a very bad day. Whether it binds anybody turns on who signed it, what authority they actually held over the resident’s affairs at that moment, and what the document itself says. It is challenged rather than accepted, and reading it is among the first things done in these files.
Nobody in the family lives nearby. Does that count against us?
No, and it is raised in nearly every one of these cases. The duty is the facility’s and it does not vary with how often relatives visit. Where a family could not be there, the record they could not see is exactly what a claim exists to examine, and it is the chart rather than anybody’s memory that settles what happened.
We signed an arbitration agreement on admission. Is the claim over?
Not necessarily. Arbitration provisions in nursing home admission paperwork are common and they are frequently challenged, on grounds including who signed, whether they had authority, and whether the terms are enforceable. Bring us the admission packet rather than assuming it settles the question.
Should we report it to the state as well?
You can, and it costs nothing. A regulatory complaint triggers an independent investigation and can result in citations against the facility. It does not compensate your family and it does not replace a civil claim, but the findings can be useful and the two run in parallel.
The questions that come up on every kind of claim, deadlines, fees, recorded statements and fault, are answered on our Florida injury claim FAQ.
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Tell us what happened
A lawyer will listen, tell you what Florida law does with those facts, and be straight with you about whether it is worth bringing. We are at 2101 W Commercial Blvd, Suite 1500, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309.