Drug rehab facilities can be forced to provide support to patients injured while in their care.
Beyond an injury settlement, facilities can be hit with punitive damages that punish owners for their extreme lack of care towards patients.
Punitive damages can be assessed when owners slash staffing to increase profitability and put patients at increased risk.
What Are Punitive Damages?
“Punitive Damages” are penalties assigned in civil lawsuits that go beyond the awards to victims. Drug rehab organizations are fined as an additional punishment for their malicious actions that caused someone to get hurt.
Punitive damages are used to punish owners for allowing certain grossly negligent behavior regarding a patient’s well-being. It’s hoped the penalties keep the business from allowing such carelessness, such as allowing staffing to get dangerously low, again. It’s also meant as a warning to other treatment facilities.
The fines aren’t issued for the injured patient’s sake, but the fines do go to victims and their families. These fines can be on top of what families earn in a wrongful death claim if facility company negligence causes a tragic death. See: The damages families can demand in a wrongful death overdose claim
Actions that Earn Punitive Damages for Drug Rehab Facilities
When companies make dangerous decisions in staffing and spending cuts, their reckless decisions can put patients at life-threatening risk. Their moves to boost profits can affect a staff’s ability to monitor Substance Use Disorder (SUD) sufferers. Wellness checks can dwindle, leaving patients more time to obtain and use drugs.
Punitive damages may be handed down by a judge and, thankfully, victims do take home the fines that rehab clinic owners must pay.
These and other circumstances involving understaffing might earn punitive damages:
- A facility that covered up evidence of negligence or destroyed evidence
- A treatment center falsified documents, hiring records, and staffing logs to conceal a problem
- An overdosed patient went undiscovered for minutes or hours due to a lack of staffing
- Cuts in security personnel allowed drugs to enter a facility
- Cuts in clinical staff left fewer qualified staff members to react to a detox or overdose emergency
- Cuts in clerical staffing allowed a patient to get released early and come to harm
These and other circumstances might not be enough to justify punitive damages in every case. But when problems repeatedly arose with no action taken, a facility may be closer to earning sanctions.
A skilled attorney can assist victims and families in recovering the evidence they need to show a persistent problem. An attorney’s investigative work can also help convince a judge that punitive damages are appropriate.
Contact us if a rehab facility caused your loved one to get injured.
Attorney Martin Gasparian offers a free, confidential consultation to rehab patients who have been injured and families who lost a loved one at a California rehab facility.
This meeting comes with no obligation. It’s a no-risk opportunity to find out what a case should be worth, and what treatment centers should be fully responsible for.
Call us today or fill out a free case review form.