Signing a mandatory arbitration agreement with a nursing home can be troublesome

When Paul Ormond signed John Mitchell into a nursing home in Dennis, Mass., in June, he was handed a few dozen pages of admission papers. Ormond, Mitchell’s legal guardian and an old friend, signed wherever the director of admissions told him to. He didn’t realize that one of those documents was an agreement that required Mitchell and his family to take disputes to a professional arbitrator rather than to court. Mitchell had been institutionalized since suffering a stroke in 1999. During a hospital stay early this summer, Mitchell, then 69, had received a tracheotomy and needed to switch to a nursing home that could accommodate him. A few weeks after Mitchell arrived at the new nursing home, staff members dropped him while using a lift device. An ambulance was called and then canceled as his vital signs stabilized. Later that night Ormond, 63, got a call from the nursing home that Mitchell was unresponsive. Mitchell was rushed to the hospital, and doctors found that the fall had caused extensive bleeding on his brain. He died a few days later. Mitchell’s sons hired a lawyer to look into the circumstances surrounding their father’s death. That was when Ormond learned that amid all the admissions papers he had signed was an arbitration agreement. “I thought it was deceptive, and I was pretty angry that I’d been tricked into signing something that I didn’t know what it was,” says Ormond.

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Signing a mandatory arbitration agreement with a nursing home can be troublesome