Many families across Tennessee will at one point in time or another have a situation where an elderly parent, grandparent or family member is admitted to a nursing home. When that occurs, many nursing homes will present to the family a contract for nursing home services and fees. Generally, these contracts are not negotiable and the nursing home will not admit the individual without someone signing. Often that someone is not the person being admitted but a family member.
One of the things often included, and sometimes hidden, in those nursing home agreements is a provision that purports to require any claims, including negligence and malpractice claims to be decided solely in arbitration. Those provisions have one primary objective – to waive the person’s and potentially the family’s right to a jury trial if something goes wrong and their loved is negligently injured or killed.
In a case decided in December 2019, the Tennessee Court of Appeals held that such an arbitration provision was not enforceable because the contract had been signed by the person’s son and there was no evidence that the son had legal authority to sign for the parent, much less to waive the right to a jury trial.
We hope that you never face a situation where a family member is abused, mistreated, negligently harmed or even killed as a result of conduct (or omissions) by a nursing home that falls below the required minimum standards of care. If that happens, however, you need to be prepared to reach out to an attorney soon after the event to review it and to see if there are things, including preserving evidence, that needs to be done immediately. Our prayer is that you never, ever need this service but if you do you can contact us for assistance.