20 Trial Lawyer • Winter 2023 has a website with photos of happy seniors blowing bubbles, picking flowers and dining on sumptuous meals. Promises are made about how wonderful the care their loved one will receive if the family chooses to admit them. Look closely at the website, particularly in the “about us,” “contact us,” “resources” and “employment opportunities” sections. It is often in those locations that one can find out the identity of any management companies who may later be named as a defendant. This information is not available through the secretary of state because management companies are not affiliated with the facility when it registers. Facilities are becoming more savvy about keeping a management company’s information off of their websites, so I will take the 10 minutes or so to check its past websites on the Wayback Machine, https://archive.org/web. There, just type in the URL of the website you’d like to brows e in the s ea rch box , then select the year you want to look at on the timeline. Click any day highlighted with a blue dot and the past website will pop up. The Oregon authority When my assistant takes the initial call from a potential client, she always asks for the names of any nurses, medication aides and CNAs who were involved in the resident’s care. She also asks for copies of any facility records the client may have. Often there is admission paperwork, and, in the case of memory care and assisted living facilities, there will be service plans signed by the resident or resident’s representative and acknowledged by all staff responsible for providing care. All nurses, med aides and CNAs must be licensed through the Oregon Board of Nursing. The Board’s website, https:// osbn.boardsofnursing.org/licenselookup allows one to check the status of a caregiver’s license, as well as their disciplinary history. With the first and last name of the licensee, the board provides the license status, original date of issue, and states whether the licensee has been disciplined. If so, the basis for the discipline is identified, and any stipulated orders containing the terms and conditions of probation are available in PDF format. In a case Medford attorney Faith Morse and I had against a skilled nursing facility for failure to administer medications as prescribed, the OBN’s website provided licensing information on one of the nurses showing he had previously been placed on probation for diverting (aka stealing) medications from residents in a facility. As the nurse who was the last person to document administering benzodiazepines to our client’s decedent — drugs which were not present in her system when admitted to the hospital only hours Pre-Discovery Continued from p 19
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