Health Care Investigations
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Casale Associates has the integrity and experience to investigate health care, nursing home and elder abuse. We can document instances of neglect, misconduct and fraud for those who depend on others for their care and wellbeing.
Unscrupulous Health Care providers, nursing homes, assisted living centers, rehabilitation clinics as well as home care attendants will be held accountable when they engaged in abuse, cause serious injury or wrongful death, or perpetrate battery, fraud, theft or other criminal actions on patient.
When in need and vulnerable you and your loved ones should not have to accept anything less than professional health care services.
Our experienced lawyer investigators and private detectives can work closely with your attorneys. We will immediately respond to an incident, record statements, gather evidence - we have the experience and integrity to uncover the facts.
Abuse, neglect, misconduct, medical malpractice or willful negligence by health care providers must be reported.
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The New York Times
Abused and Used - In State Care, 1,200 Deaths and Few Answers
By DANNY HAKIM and RUSS BUETTNER
November 5, 2011 --- Excerpt --- In New York, it is unusually common for developmentally disabled people in state care to die for reasons other than natural causes.
One in six of all deaths in state and privately run homes, or more than 1,200 in the past decade, have been attributed to either unnatural or unknown causes, according to data obtained by The New York Times that has never been released.
The figure is more like one in 25 in Connecticut and Massachusetts, which are among the few states that release such data.
What’s more, New York has made little effort to track or thoroughly investigate the deaths to look for troubling trends, resulting in the same kinds of errors and preventable deaths, over and over.
The state does not even collect statistics on specific causes of death, leaving many designated as “unknown,” sometimes even after a medical examiner has made a ruling.
The Times undertook its own analysis of death records and found disturbing patterns: some residents who were not supposed to be left alone with food choked in bathrooms and kitchens. Others who needed help on stairs tumbled alone to their deaths. Still others ran away again and again until they were found dead.
The records also showed that problems leading to deaths rarely resulted in systemwide steps, like alerts to all operators of homes, to prevent mistakes from recurring. Responses were typically limited to the group home where a resident died.
At homes operated by nonprofit organizations, low-level employees were often fired or disciplined, but repercussions for executives were rare. At state-run homes, it is also difficult to take action against caregivers, who are represented by unions that contest disciplinary measures.
New York relies heavily on the operators of the homes to investigate and determine how a person in their care died and, in a vast majority of cases, accepts that determination. And the state has no uniform training for the nearly 100,000 workers at thousands of state and privately run homes and institutions.
The value of analyzing death records for problems in care that could be prevented through alerts or training has been well established, and is encouraged by the federal Government Accountability Office. Officials in Connecticut, for example, noticed four choking deaths in 2006, the first year the state published such data. They developed a statewide program — two days of initial training and a refresher course every two years thereafter. The state has had just one choking death since 2007. New York has had at least 21 during that same period.
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