Dominique ( Personal Injury )
Bertha Davis lived at Pensacola Health Care Facility. She fell.
The fall killed her.
Jury Said the Facility Was at Fault
In April 2019, a jury in Escambia County heard the evidence and came back with a $200,000 verdict for her family. They found the nursing home was negligent in caring for Ms. Davis and that the lack of supervision directly caused her fall.
Two hundred thousand dollars for a life.
That number sits at the low end of Florida nursing home verdicts, where the median payout across the state is roughly $1.5 million according to Law.com’s VerdictSearch data. But the Davis case was not about a massive corporate payout. It was about whether the facility had enough people on staff to watch a resident who needed watching, and whether anybody was paying attention when she went down.
Escambia County has almost 30 assisted living facilities. The senior population in Northwest Florida keeps growing. And the question of whether the people inside those facilities are actually being looked after is not one that gets answered by reading the brochure.
A 90-Year-Old Left Rosewood Healthcare with Skin Growing Over Her Bandages
A second Pensacola case sits in the public record and it is harder to read than the Davis verdict.
A 90-year-old woman was admitted to the hospital from Rosewood Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center, also in Pensacola. When the hospital doctors examined her they found she was dehydrated, malnourished, covered in bruises and scabs on her back, and had skin literally growing over bandages that had not been changed.
She was also suffering from sepsis caused by an untreated urinary tract infection.
Skin growing over bandages means those bandages had been on her body for so long that new tissue formed around them. That does not happen in a day or a week. That happens when nobody is checking. When nobody is changing wound dressings. When a resident is sitting in a facility that is supposed to be providing daily care and the daily care is not happening.
Florida Statute § 400.022 Spells Out Resident Rights and Facilities Keep Violating Them
Florida’s Nursing Home Residents’ Rights are codified in § 400.022 of the Florida Statutes. The law requires facilities to provide adequate and appropriate health care, to maintain the dignity and privacy of residents, and to ensure that residents are free from abuse, neglect, and exploitation.
§ 400.0233 goes further. It establishes standards for minimum staffing levels, documentation requirements, and the obligation to develop and follow individualized care plans for each resident.
When a resident develops bedsores that progress to Stage 4 (tissue damage down to bone), or loses significant weight without medical explanation, or accumulates bruises with no documented incident reports, those are not ambiguities in the law. They are violations of specific statutory requirements that the facility agreed to follow as a condition of its licence.
According to Rainey C. Booth, Pensacola nursing home abuse attorney and Managing Partner at Michles & Booth, the pattern in these cases tends to follow the same trajectory. Staffing drops. The remaining staff cannot cover the number of residents who need repositioning, wound care, hydration monitoring, and medication management. Incident reports stop being filed because there are not enough people to write them. And by the time the family notices the decline, the damage has been compounding for weeks or months.
Booth is a Florida Bar Board Certified Civil Trial Specialist who has practiced in Pensacola since 1984. His firm handles nursing home abuse cases across Northwest Florida.
More Than 60% of Florida Nursing Homes Changed Ownership Since 2019
A 2025 AARP Florida report tracked what happened to the state’s nursing home industry over a five-year period and the numbers explain a lot about why cases like Davis and Rosewood keep showing up.
425 Florida nursing homes changed ownership between 2019 and early 2024. That is more than 60% of the state’s total nursing home inventory.
At least 156 of those facilities were acquired by private equity investors.
After ownership changes:
- Average CMS quality ratings at private-equity-acquired facilities fell from 3.4 to 2.9 stars.
- Direct care staffing dropped 13% per resident.
- Residents received roughly 33 fewer minutes of care per day on average.
- The number of top-rated facilities was cut in half.
- The number of lowest-rated facilities more than doubled.
Thirty-three fewer minutes per day does not sound catastrophic until you think about what fits inside 33 minutes. A wound dressing change. A repositioning to prevent pressure sores. A check on whether a resident has been drinking enough water. A medication pass. Any one of those tasks skipped once is a minor gap. Skipped repeatedly across weeks and months, it produces the kind of outcomes that put a 90-year-old in the hospital with skin growing over her bandages.
The Presuit Requirement Under § 400.0233
Florida requires a presuit process before a nursing home neglect lawsuit can proceed. The statute mandates that the claimant serve a written notice of intent to initiate litigation, along with a verified written opinion from a medical expert corroborating that the facility breached the applicable standard of care.
The facility then has a statutory window to investigate and respond.
This process eats into the statute of limitations. Florida’s two-year filing deadline for personal injury (reduced from four years by the 2023 tort reform under HB 837) means the presuit period and the filing deadline can overlap in ways that pressure families who are still processing what happened.
Starting the presuit process requires gathering medical records, incident reports, staffing logs, and the resident’s care plan. If the facility is uncooperative about producing records, that resistance itself becomes part of the case, but it also slows the timeline.
Staffing Logs Tell the Real Story
Medical records show what happened to the resident. Staffing logs show why.
Every nursing home in Florida is required to document daily staffing levels. Those logs record how many certified nursing assistants, licensed practical nurses, and registered nurses were working each shift, and the ratio of staff to residents.
When a bedsore develops because nobody repositioned the resident every two hours, the staffing log from that period shows whether the facility had enough people on the floor to do the repositioning. When a fall happens because nobody was supervising a resident assessed as a fall risk, the staffing log shows whether supervision was even possible given the number of residents and the number of staff on duty.
These logs are discoverable in litigation. They are often the single most important piece of evidence in a nursing home neglect case because they connect the resident’s injury to a staffing decision the facility made, and that staffing decision is what separates an unavoidable incident from negligence.
Reporting Suspected Abuse in Escambia County
Florida’s Elder Abuse Hotline operates statewide at 1-800-962-2873. Reports can be made anonymously. The Department of Children and Families investigates reports of abuse, neglect, and exploitation of elderly and disabled adults.
The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) handles facility-level complaints at ahca.myflorida.com. AHCA has the authority to inspect facilities, issue citations, impose fines, and in extreme cases revoke a facility’s licence.
If the situation involves immediate physical danger, call 911. Escambia County Sheriff’s Office handles criminal elder abuse investigations.
Document everything before reporting. Photographs of injuries with dates. Notes on the resident’s condition at each visit. Names of staff members present. Weight records if available. The more specific the documentation, the stronger the foundation for both the regulatory complaint and any legal action that follows.
References
- Bertha Davis v. Pensacola Health Care Facility, Escambia County, $200,000 jury verdict, April 2019.
- Rosewood Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center, Pensacola. 90-year-old resident admitted to hospital with dehydration, malnutrition, sepsis from untreated UTI, bruises, and skin growing over unchanged bandages. Reported by Senior Justice Law Firm.
- Florida Statute § 400.022, Nursing Home Residents’ Rights.
- Florida Statute § 400.0233, Minimum staffing standards and presuit requirements for nursing home claims.
- AARP Florida (2025), “Change of Ownership and Quality in Florida Nursing Homes.” 425 ownership changes, 156 PE acquisitions, quality and staffing declines documented.
- Law.com VerdictSearch, Florida nursing home verdicts and settlements. Median value $1,514,615.
- Florida Elder Abuse Hotline: 1-800-962-2873.
- Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA): ahca.myflorida.com.
