Drug rehab facility negligence
The firm represents families whose loved one died or was seriously harmed while under the care of a drug rehabilitation, detox, or behavioral health facility in Georgia. When a treatment center doesn’t maintain basic safeguards, including naloxone (Narcan) to reverse an overdose, the result can be fatal.
Someone entering treatment is at their most vulnerable on the day they arrive, and a facility that admits them takes on responsibility for keeping them alive while they are there. These claims are about whether it did.
What can go wrong
Facilities unprepared for emergencies
Some facilities serve patients at a high risk of overdose without an emergency protocol or the medication on hand to respond.
Inadequate staff training
Staff without proper medical training may not recognize the signs of an overdose or know how to respond.
Absence of naloxone
Naloxone (Narcan) reverses an opioid overdose. A facility without an adequate supply, or without staff trained to administer it, falls short of the standard of care.
The failures these cases usually turn on
No two facilities fail in quite the same way, but the same handful of failures come up again and again, and each leaves a documentary trail that can be recovered later:
- A patient left unobserved through the hours when withdrawal is most dangerous, in a facility whose own policy called for checks that nobody performed or recorded
- Detox managed without medical supervision, or without the monitoring that a patient withdrawing from alcohol or benzodiazepines requires
- An overdose that went unrecognized, or was recognized and met with a call to a supervisor rather than a call to 911
- Naloxone absent, expired, locked away from the staff who needed it, or never issued to the people on shift
- Admission of a patient whose medical or psychiatric needs the facility was not licensed, staffed, or equipped to meet
- Prescription medication left unsecured, or drugs brought onto a campus that was not searching for them
- Staffing levels below what the facility told the family, the referring hospital, or the state that it maintained
These are proved from the facility’s own records: the census and staffing sheets for the shift, the observation logs, the medication administration record, incident reports, licensing and inspection history, and the policies the facility wrote for itself and then departed from. Much of that material is retained only for a limited period, which is the practical reason to speak with a lawyer early.
What the firm has handled
The firm has represented families in matters involving rehabilitation and treatment centers that failed to monitor patients properly, did not have an adequate emergency-response protocol, or did not administer naloxone during an overdose. A claim of this kind resolved for $1 million on behalf of the family of a patient who died in a facility’s care.
The work is not confined to metro Atlanta. The firm takes these cases across Georgia, and the facilities involved are often in smaller counties where a single treatment center or crisis facility serves a wide area.
The firm also represents the family of a man who drowned in a pond beside a Gainesville behavioral health crisis center, in a filed wrongful-death suit alleging that law enforcement attempted to bypass required medical clearance before bringing him there. That matter was reported by the Gainesville Times and is described on the firm’s news page. It is pending, and nothing here should be read as a prediction of its outcome.
Representative results
A settlement, reached in two parts, on behalf of a client harmed by neglect, one part resolving claims against an addiction treatment facility.
A settlement resolving a claim against a treatment facility and its operators following a death.
Time limits apply
Georgia law limits the time to bring a malpractice or wrongful-death claim, and a claim against a public hospital authority or a county-run facility can carry a much shorter notice deadline than the ordinary limitation period. Missing that notice can end a claim before it is filed.
The sooner you contact the firm, the more options you are likely to have, and the better the chance that the facility’s records still exist. The initial consultation is free.