When you entrust a nursing home with the care of an elderly loved one, you are placing an immense amount of faith in that facility and its staff. Finding out that neglect has shattered this trust can be a devastating experience. You may see the signs—unexplained bruises, rapid weight loss, bedsores, or a sudden change in demeanor—and your first instinct is to hold the person responsible accountable.

But who is legally responsible? Is it just the single nurse or aide who failed to provide care? Or is it the facility itself? In 2024, the Ohio Long-Term Care Ombudsman program received 7,350 complaints, a troubling 3.5% increase from the previous year. Estimates suggest that for every reported case of elder abuse, over 20 remain undocumented.

The law in Ohio provides multiple pathways to justice. While an individual employee can be held liable, a powerful legal doctrine called vicarious liability often allows families to hold the nursing home corporation responsible for the actions of its staff. This, combined with claims for the facility's own negligence, provides a comprehensive way to seek accountability.

This article will explore the different parties who can be held legally liable for nursing home neglect in Ohio and explain the significant role that vicarious liability plays in these complex cases.

The Heartbreaking Reality of Nursing Home Neglect

First, it is helpful to distinguish between abuse and neglect, though both are forms of mistreatment.

• Nursing Home Abuse is typically an intentional act that causes harm. This includes physical violence, sexual assault, emotional or verbal harassment, and intentional over-medication.
• Nursing Home Neglect is most often a failure to act or a breach of the required standard of care. It is a failure to provide the basic necessities that a resident needs to thrive.

Because neglect is often passive, its signs can be harder to spot. Families should be vigilant for:

• Bedsores (Pressure Ulcers): Caused by a failure to regularly turn or reposition a resident with limited mobility.
• Malnutrition and Dehydration: Resulting from a failure to provide adequate food and water or to assist residents who need help eating or drinking.
• Poor Personal Hygiene: Unbathed residents, soiled bedding, or strong odors can indicate a lack of basic care.
• Unexplained Falls: While not all falls are preventable, repeated falls can signal a lack of supervision, failure to follow a fall-prevention plan, or an unsafe environment.
• Medication Errors: Giving the wrong medication, the wrong dose, or missing doses entirely.
• Worsening Medical Conditions: A failure to monitor a resident's health or report new symptoms to a doctor.

These failures cause profound physical suffering and emotional distress, and they are a direct violation of the care your loved one is entitled to receive.

Ohio Law and the Foundation of a Claim

Ohio has specific laws in place to protect the elderly. The Ohio Residents' Rights Act (found in the Ohio Revised Code) establishes a "bill of rights" for every person in a long-term care facility. These rights include, but are not limited to:

• The right to be free from physical, verbal, mental, or emotional abuse, neglect, and exploitation.
• The right to receive adequate and appropriate medical treatment and nursing care.
• The right to a safe and clean living environment.

When a nursing home fails to uphold these rights and that failure results in harm, the facility has breached its duty of care. This breach is the legal foundation for a lawsuit regarding nursing home neglect. The central question then becomes: who, specifically, must answer for that breach?

Primary Liability: The Individual Who Caused the Harm

The most direct line of liability points to the individual staff member whose actions—or inactions—constituted neglect. If a registered nurse failed to change a resident's wound dressing, leading to a severe infection, that nurse was negligent. If an aide failed to assist a resident with walking, and the resident fell and broke a hip, that aide was negligent.

These individuals can be named as defendants in a lawsuit. They had a professional duty of care, they breached it, and that breach caused direct harm.

However, in practice, pursuing a claim only against the individual employee is often an incomplete solution. An individual nurse or aide likely does not have the financial resources or insurance coverage to fully compensate a family for catastrophic medical bills, permanent disability, and the profound pain and suffering caused by the neglect.

This is why attorneys look "up the chain" to the employer: the nursing home facility.

Explaining Vicarious Liability in the Context of Elder Abuse

This brings us to the most common legal tool used in these cases: vicarious liability.

Vicarious liability is a legal doctrine, also known as respondeat superior, which holds an employer legally responsible for the wrongful acts of an employee.

The logic is simple: The employer (the nursing home) hired the employee, trained them, supervises them, and benefits from their work. Therefore, the employer must also bear the legal and financial responsibility when that employee causes harm while performing their job.

In a nursing home neglect case, this means that even if the facility's owners and managers did nothing "wrong" themselves, they are automatically liable for the negligence of their staff.

The "Scope of Employment" Requirement

Vicarious liability is not absolute. It only applies if the employee's negligent act occurred within the "scope of employment."

This is a critical legal test. To be "within the scope of employment," the employee's actions must be:

1. Related to the kind of work they were hired to perform.
2. Done substantially within the time and space limits of their job.
3. Motivated, at least in part, by a purpose to serve the employer.

Let's look at how this applies to nursing home neglect:

• Act Within Scope: A nursing assistant is tasked with repositioning a bed-bound patient every two hours to prevent bedsores. The assistant skips this duty for an entire 12-hour shift, and the resident develops a severe pressure ulcer. This incident is a clear case of negligence within the scope of employment. The assistant was failing at the very job they were hired to do. The nursing home is vicariously liable.
• Act Within Scope: A nurse misreads a chart and administers the wrong medication, causing a resident to have a severe allergic reaction. This is a negligent performance of a core job duty. The nursing home is vicariously liable.
• Act Outside Scope: An aide enters into a personal argument with their visiting family member in the nursing home lobby and shoves them. This is unrelated to resident care and does not advance the employer's business. The facility is likely not vicariously liable for this battery.

In many cases of nursing home neglect in Ohio, the acts are, by their very nature, failures to properly perform job duties. This makes vicarious liability a powerful and direct path to holding the facility accountable for the harm its residents have suffered.

Direct Nursing Home Neglect Liability: When the Facility Itself Is at Fault

Vicarious liability is not the only way to hold a facility accountable. In many cases, the facility is liable for its negligence, completely separate from the actions of its employees. This is known as direct liability or corporate negligence.

This type of claim alleges that the corporation itself—through its policies, management, and business decisions—created an environment where neglect was not just possible but probable.

Systemic Failures and Corporate Negligence

A direct liability claim looks at the decisions made in the boardroom, not just at the resident's bedside. Common examples of corporate negligence include:

Negligent Hiring and Retention

The facility has a duty to vet its employees. This claim arises when a facility hires an employee it knew or should have known was unfit for the job.

• Hiring an aide with a known history of elder abuse or a criminal record for assault.
• Failing to conduct any meaningful background check.
• Failing to verify licenses or check references. Retention is also key. If a facility keeps an employee on staff despite numerous, credible complaints of neglect or rough handling from residents, the facility becomes directly liable when that employee inevitably harms someone else.

Pervasive Understaffing

This is one of the most common and dangerous forms of corporate negligence. Many for-profit nursing home chains attempt to maximize profits by intentionally running their facilities with skeleton crews.

• When a single nurse is responsible for 30 or 40 residents, it is impossible to provide adequate care.
• Call lights go unanswered for long periods.
• Residents who need help eating are skipped.
• Staff are overworked, burned out, and prone to making mistakes. When neglect occurs in this environment, it is not just the fault of the overwhelmed nurse. It is the direct fault of the corporation that made a business decision to prioritize profit over resident safety.

Inadequate Training and Supervision

A nursing home must provide its staff with the proper training to handle the specific needs of its residents.

• Failure to train staff on how to use a Hoyer lift, leading to a resident being dropped.
• Lack of training on dementia care, leading to staff mishandling a resident with challenging behaviors.
• Lack of supervision for new or agency nurses, resulting in medication errors.

Failure to Maintain a Safe Environment

The facility itself can be hazardous. This is a form of premises liability.

• Poorly maintained equipment, such as broken bed rails or malfunctioning wheelchairs.
• Unsafe walking surfaces, like cluttered hallways or wet floors with no warning signs.
• Inadequate lighting in common areas, leading to falls.
• Failure to install or maintain bed alarms for high-risk residents.

An experienced attorney will often pursue both vicarious liability and direct liability claims. They may argue that the aide was negligent (vicarious liability) and that the only reason that negligent aide was in a position to cause harm was because the company was negligent in its hiring and staffing policies (direct liability).

Identifying All Potential Defendants in a Nursing Home Abuse Case

A thorough investigation may reveal that liability extends even further than the staff and the facility. Holding all responsible parties accountable is essential for securing fair compensation.

The Facility and Its Parent Corporation

Many local nursing homes are not standalone businesses. They are often one small piece of a massive, multi-state corporate chain. These parent companies often dictate the budgets, staffing levels, and policies for all their facilities. A nursing home abuse attorney will investigate this corporate structure to determine if the parent company can also be held liable for systemic decisions that led to the neglect.

Third-Party Vendors and Contractors

Nursing homes often outsource key functions. If these third-party companies are negligent, they can be held liable.

• Medical Equipment Suppliers: If a faulty hospital bed or wheelchair malfunctions and injures a resident, the manufacturer or supplier may be liable.
• Contracted Doctors: Many facilities use "house doctors" who are independent contractors, not employees. If their medical malpractice contributes to the neglect (e.g., failing to diagnose and treat an infection), they can be sued.
• Food or Cleaning Services: If an outside food vendor causes a food poisoning outbreak, they would be a liable party.

Medical Directors and Administrators

The individuals in management—the facility administrator or the medical director—can also be held personally liable if they created or knowingly enforced policies that led to harm.

Why You Need an Experienced Ohio Nursing Home Abuse Lawyer

As you can see, a "simple" case of neglect is rarely simple. It involves overlapping layers of liability, complex corporate structures, and specific requirements under Ohio law.

Distinguishing Between Neglect and Elder Abuse

An attorney can analyze the facts of your case to determine the strongest legal claim, whether it is rooted in neglect (a failure to act) or active elder abuse. Both are serious, but they may require different types of evidence.

The Role of a Nursing Home Abuse Attorney in Uncovering Liability

A skilled lawyer specializing in nursing home abuse knows where to look for evidence. They will immediately move to obtain:

• The resident's complete medical chart.
• Internal incident reports.
• Staffing schedules (to prove understaffing).
• Employee personnel files (to find evidence of negligent hiring).
• State inspection and citation reports.
• Video surveillance footage.

This evidence is used to build a robust case demonstrating either vicarious liability, corporate negligence, or both.

Standing Up to Corporate Insurers

Powerful insurance companies and experienced legal teams protect these large nursing home chains. Their goal is to pay as little as possible by deflecting blame, delaying the process, or claiming the harm was an "unavoidable accident."

An Ohio nursing home abuse lawyer who focuses on this area of law understands these tactics. They level the playing field, handle all communications with the insurance adjusters, and build a case strong enough to win at trial if a fair settlement is not offered.

Need Legal Help? Brandon J. Broderick, Attorney at Law, is One Phone Call Away

Finding out about a loved one's neglect violates trust, leaving families feeling angry, guilty, and powerless. But you are not powerless. The law provides a way to fight back.

At Brandon J. Broderick, Attorney at Law, we are dedicated to being a voice for the most vulnerable. We understand the complex laws governing nursing home liability in Ohio and have the resources to investigate exactly what happened and who is responsible. We work tirelessly to hold negligent facilities accountable and secure the compensation your family deserves for medical bills, pain, and suffering.

You don't have to go through this alone. For a free, confidential consultation, contact us today. Let us help you get the justice your family deserves. We are available day or night to assist you.