Alabama Nursing Home Abuse Lawyer

If your parent or spouse was neglected or abused in an Alabama nursing home or assisted living facility, the facility can be held responsible for what it did.

Alabama treats those facilities as hospitals under the Alabama Medical Liability Act, so a neglect case generally follows malpractice rules.

You generally have two years from the neglect, and four years is the outer limit in almost every case.

If your loved one is alive and frail, ask about filing now, because an unfiled injury claim generally ends at death.

If you believe your loved one is in danger today, call 911 first, and report it to the state using the numbers on this page.

Then call (888) 713-6653 for a free review, with no fee and no costs unless we recover.

Families are often the first to notice something is wrong, and they often feel guilty for not seeing it sooner. A facility that was paid to care for your loved one is the one responsible for this. These are the patterns that most often lead to a claim.

Your loved one's safety comes before any lawsuit. If there is immediate danger, call 911. You do not need a lawyer's permission to do any of these.

• File a complaint with the Alabama Department of Public Health. Its Bureau of Health Provider Standards licenses and inspects nursing homes and takes complaints online, by mail at 201 Monroe Street, Suite 700, Montgomery, AL 36130-3017, or through its ElderCare Hotline at 1-800-356-9596. Assisted living complaints have their own hotline, 1-866-873-0366.^[2]
• Call the long-term care ombudsman. The Alabama Department of Senior Services runs an ombudsman program for residents of nursing homes and assisted living, and anyone can use it. You can reach it through 1-800-AGE-LINE.^[3]
• Ask for the care plan and chart. A resident or their legal representative has a right to records. Write down the date you asked and who you asked.
• Photograph what you see, with dates and with your loved one's permission where possible. Keep any messages you sent to staff.

A family who moves a resident should tell us before the move if possible, because the current facility's records and the condition on discharge are important evidence. Our page on how to report nursing home abuse has more on what to expect.

The Act's definition of "hospital" reaches skilled nursing, intermediate care, and assisted living facilities.^[4] So the rules that make malpractice cases demanding apply here.

• The deadline. Generally two years from the act or omission or the injury it caused, six months from discovery if it could not reasonably have been found sooner, and no more than four years.^[5]
• The expert. You usually need testimony from a similarly situated provider on the standard of care, often a nurse or nursing home administrator.
• The complaint. It must give "a detailed specification and factual description of each act and omission," and discovery stops at what is pleaded, so the chart has to be read before the case is written.^[6]
• Staffing and supervision. The same pleading rule reaches a facility's hiring, training, supervision, and retention of caregivers, so that theory has to be stated early.

Our page on Alabama medical malpractice claims covers these rules in more depth. You do not have to work out any of this yourself, and the firm covers the cost of the experts.

When neglect causes a resident's death, the personal representative can bring a wrongful death claim within two years of the death. Alabama's jury weighs how wrong the facility's conduct was, and no cap applies to that verdict against a private operator. Our page on the punitive award in an Alabama death case explains it.

Alabama has a harsher rule for a resident who dies with no lawsuit on file. The resident's own injury claim generally does not survive, so if they die of something other than the neglect, the claim for their suffering can end with them. Even when the neglect caused the death, their medical bills and pain before death cannot be recovered without a filed suit. This is why we often recommend filing early for a nursing home resident, and our page on what happens when the injured person dies explains the details.

Many facilities put an arbitration agreement in the admission packet. Alabama courts enforce these under the Federal Arbitration Act, and once a facility produces an agreement that appears signed by someone with authority, the family has to come forward with evidence against it. That would take your case away from a jury. Whether it binds your loved one usually depends on who signed and what the resident could understand at the time.

• A competent resident who let a relative handle the paperwork. The relative's signature can bind the resident on apparent authority, and in Carraway v. Beverly Enterprises (2007) the wrongful death claim went to arbitration too.^[7]
• A resident who was incompetent, and a relative with no legal authority. The Court has said "incompetent residents are not so bound," and in Diversicare v. Hubbard (2015) the rule held even when the relative who signed later became the personal representative.^[8]
• What the facility knew matters. In Ball Healthcare v. Flennory (2022), a competent resident's daughter signed for her. Records showing the resident could have signed herself did not defeat the daughter's apparent authority, because nothing showed the facility knew about them.

Do not assume you are stuck, and do not assume you are free of it. Find the admission packet, any power of attorney, and the medical records from around the admission date, and send them to us. If your loved one is being admitted now, read the packet before signing. Federal rules do not let a Medicare- or Medicaid-certified facility make an arbitration agreement a condition of admission, and they give the resident 30 calendar days after signing to rescind it.^[9]

A living resident's claim can include medical care, the cost of moving to better care, and pain, disfigurement, and mental anguish. An older person's lack of earnings does not make that suffering worth less. No statute caps compensatory damages, and on clear and convincing proof of wantonness, a jury can add punitive damages within the general caps. A death claim is punitive only, with no cap against a private operator.

The size of the operator matters too. A facility may be owned through layers of companies, and the operator, management company, and owner of the building may all be different. We look at each before valuing a claim.

Medicaid and Medicare can have their own claims on a recovery. Under Ala. Code § 22-6-6, the State is subrogated to the extent of what Medicaid paid, and notice of a lawsuit must go to the Medicaid director and the Attorney General within 10 days of filing.^[10] Federal law limits a state's claim to the part of a settlement that represents medical costs, so we work to keep that reimbursement from taking more than it should.

The two years generally run from when the act or omission caused injury, which may be well before your family saw the wound or read the chart. Count from the earliest date anyone could argue. If it could not reasonably have been discovered, you have six months from discovery, and nothing can be filed after four years. A death claim runs two years from the death, as long as the resident could still have sued when they died.

Neglect tends to unfold over weeks and months, so we pin down which date governs early. A facility run by a county or city health authority can also raise government limits, so tell us the facility's name when you call.