Most families who end up calling us did everything right. They visited. They asked questions. They just always visited on Sunday afternoon, which is the shift the facility was ready for. Our Katy nursing home abuse lawyers represent families across Katy, Cinco Ranch, and Cross Creek Ranch whose parent was hurt by neglect in a long-term care facility.
If something has felt wrong and you cannot prove it, that is a normal place to be starting from.
(713) 973-8888. You can call with a suspicion.
Contact the Terry Bryant team to begin the investigation
What should I look for when I visit a nursing home?
Change the day and the time before you change anything else. A facility with staffing problems does not have them evenly, and a Sunday afternoon visit shows you the version of the building that expects visitors. The single most informative thing a family can do costs nothing: arrive on a Tuesday at 7 a.m., or a Saturday at 9 p.m., unannounced.
What that reveals that a scheduled visit does not:
Call light response. Sit in the room and time it once. Everything about staffing shows up in that number.
Who is actually working? Count staff in the hall at 8 p.m. and compare it to a weekday afternoon.
Meal reality. Whether your parent is eating, whether anyone assists them, and whether the tray goes back untouched.
Repositioning. For a resident who cannot move independently, this is supposed to happen on a schedule. Pressure injuries are the evidence of it not happening.
The room at night. Linens, hydration within reach, whether the call button is actually reachable from the bed.
Write down what you see with the date and the time. A single observation is an impression. Six of them across different shifts is a record, and a record is what a case is built from.
How do I look up a nursing home's inspection record in Texas?
Federal survey results, staffing data, and quality ratings for certified facilities are public, and you can read them yourself in about fifteen minutes on Medicare's Care Compare. Texas HHS also licenses and inspects long-term care facilities, and its findings sit outside anything the facility chooses to tell you.
What to actually look at rather than the star rating on the front:
- Staffing hours per resident, especially registered nurse hours, and how they compare to similar facilities
- The survey deficiencies themselves, not the count. Read what the surveyor wrote.
- Repeat citations. The same deficiency across multiple survey cycles is a pattern, not an accident.
- Staff turnover, which drives almost everything else on the list
If you find a citation that describes what you have been seeing, save it. Families often discover their own concerns already written down by a state surveyor a year earlier.
What do I do if my parent was sent to the hospital from the facility?
Request the emergency room records, and do it now. When a resident is transferred out to Memorial Hermann Katy, Houston Methodist West, or any other hospital, that admission record is usually the first document about your parent's condition that the facility did not write. That makes it the most valuable piece of paper in the whole situation.
Hospital intake notes routinely record what the facility's charting does not: the actual stage of a pressure injury, dehydration, malnutrition, an untreated infection, a fracture with no explanation, or medication levels that do not match the order.
Request them in writing, dated, as soon as you can. Also request the facility's transfer paperwork for the same event, because the comparison between the two is often the entire story.
Then call someone before you raise it with the facility. Once a family asks a pointed question, the charting improves.
Bring both sets of records to (713) 973-8888 and we will read them side by side with you.
Who do I call about neglect in Texas, and does that replace a lawyer?
Report to Texas HHS, and understand that it runs on a separate track from any claim your family might have. A state complaint investigates the facility. It does not compensate your family, and it does not gather evidence for you. Both tracks can run at once, and they should.
Texas HHS takes complaints about long-term care facilities through its complaint and incident intake system. The state also funds a Long-Term Care Ombudsman program that advocates for residents independently of the facility, at no cost to families.
Licensing and inspection authority for these facilities comes from Chapter 242 of the Texas Health and Safety Code, which also carries the resident rights provisions every facility is required to post where families can read them. Most people walk past that posting for years without looking at it.
Our Houston nursing home abuse lawyer page walks through the difference between those two tracks in detail, including what each one can and cannot produce, and who is legally responsible when a resident is hurt.
Is assisted living regulated the same way as a nursing home?
No, and the difference matters more than most families realize when something goes wrong. Assisted living facilities and nursing facilities are licensed under separate rules in Texas, with different staffing requirements, different medical oversight, and different inspection regimes. A lot of Katy's newer senior housing is assisted living rather than skilled nursing.
Where that difference shows up:
Medical staffing. Skilled nursing facilities are built around continuous nursing care. Assisted living generally is not, which becomes a problem when a resident's condition changes and nobody on site is qualified to recognize it.
Level of care. Residents sometimes remain in assisted living after their needs have outgrown what the facility is licensed to provide. Failing to recognize that, or keeping a resident whose needs exceed the license, is a claim in itself.
Falls and medication. These are the two most common assisted living cases we see, and both usually trace back to a care plan that no longer matched the person.
If you are unsure which category your parent's facility falls into, the license type is public information, and it is worth confirming before you accept anyone's explanation of what they were required to do.
Questions Worth Asking Before You Choose a Facility
Ask about staffing ratios by shift, turnover, and how they handle a change in a resident's condition after hours. Marketing tours are built around the dining room and the activity calendar. None of that is where harm happens.
Worth asking directly, and worth writing down the answers:
- How many aides are on this hall at 3 a.m., and on a Sunday?
- What is your turnover for aides and for nursing staff?
- Who assesses a resident whose condition changes at night, and how quickly?
- How do you prevent and monitor pressure injuries?
- What is your process when a family raises a concern in writing?
- May I visit again unannounced, at a time I choose?
That last one tells you a great deal from the reaction alone.
Then check the answers against the record rather than against your impression of the tour. Deficiencies, staffing data, and quality measures are published, and a facility's own account of its history is not the only account available.
Will a claim affect my parent's Medicaid or their placement?
This is the question that stops more families than any other, and the short answer is that it is manageable. A recovery can interact with needs-based benefits like Medicaid, and there are established tools for handling that, including special needs trusts designed for exactly this situation. It is a planning problem, not a reason to give up a claim.
What we look at early:
Benefit eligibility. Whether your parent receives Medicaid or other needs-based benefits, so the structure of any recovery accounts for it from the start rather than as a fix afterward.
Medicaid's repayment interest. The state may have a claim for what it paid toward care related to the injury. That amount is often negotiable and reducing it is part of the work.
Placement. A claim does not give a facility the right to discharge a resident. Involuntary transfers are regulated, not discretionary.
Raise this on the first call even if you are only exploring. Structuring a recovery correctly is far easier before there is a recovery than after.
Can I sue a nursing home in Katy for neglect?
Yes, if the facility's failures caused harm, and the claim is generally brought against the facility and the company that owns it rather than against an individual aide. What makes these cases winnable is documentation, which is why the visiting log, the hospital records, and the inspection history matter more than anyone's memory of a conversation.
One practical Katy detail. Katy sits across Harris, Fort Bend, and Waller counties, so where a case gets filed depends on the facility's actual address rather than on the mailing city. It does not change your rights and it does change the courthouse, the timeline, and the jury pool.
What a claim can recover, and the deadlines that apply, are covered on the Houston nursing home abuse hub. The short version is two years in most cases, with a complicated starting date, because neglect rarely happens on a single dateable day.
Working With Us From Katy
Our office is on the Katy Freeway, which for most Katy families is the same drive they already make, and much of this work does not require you to come in at all. Records get requested, reviewed, and compared without anyone sitting in a conference room.
Mr. Bryant is Board Certified in personal injury trial law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization, served as a judge before practicing on this side of the courtroom, and has represented injured Texans since 1985.
These are slow, document-heavy cases. Care plans against charting, charting against staffing sheets, staffing sheets against what the hospital found. That comparison is the work, and it is not something a family can reasonably do alone while also visiting, working, and managing everything else.
Prior results are published on our client victories page. Every case turns on its own facts, and past outcomes do not predict or guarantee any other result. Consultations available in English and Spanish.
Related Katy pages: Katy personal injury lawyer and Katy car accident lawyer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I move my parent out before I do anything else?
Safety comes first, so if you believe your parent is in danger, act on that. Where there is time, tell us before the move, because a transfer can change access to records and to staff who saw what happened. Moving a resident is not a legal problem and it does not weaken a claim. Losing the paper trail on the way out is the problem.
The facility says the bruises are from a fall. How would I know?
Compare the facility's account to the hospital's. Falls are supposed to generate incident documentation, a post-fall assessment, and a care plan update, and their absence is meaningful. Bruise patterns, location, and stage are also documented at the emergency room by someone with no interest in the answer.
Do I need a lawyer in Katy specifically, or in Houston?
What matters is where the case gets filed and whether the firm regularly files there, not where the office sits. A facility with a Katy address may put the case in Harris, Fort Bend, or Waller County, and we handle cases in all three from an office on the Katy Freeway.
What does it cost to have someone review the records?
Nothing to start. The consultation is free and these cases are handled on contingency, with no attorney's fee unless we recover money. We also advance the cost of obtaining and reviewing the records, which in a neglect case is substantial.
Start With the Records, Not the Confrontation
The instinct is to go ask the administrator what happened. That conversation is worth having, and it goes much better after somebody has read the file.
Send us what you have, or nothing at all, and we will tell you what to request first. (713) 973-8888. Board certified, former judge, practicing in Houston since 1985. Hablamos español.