When your loved one goes into a nursing home, the last thing you probably expect is for him or her to end up the victim of abuse. Yet, government authorities have recently estimated that one out of every five trips to an emergency room from any given nursing home is actually related to abuse.

Even worse, you can't trust the nursing home's management to tell you that your relative has been abused. Nursing homes are so eager to keep their insurance costs down and minimize any negative publicity that they try numerous ways of hiding abuse — even though reporting such incidents is required by law. 

Here are some of the top ways nursing homes try to hide the abuse of residents:

1. They use unnecessary chemical restraints

Around 20% of the residents in nursing homes are put on antipsychotic medications — most of them without just cause. The use of these high-powered drugs often amounts to little more than a form of chemical restraint. They keep patients so subdued that they can have difficulty communicating.

That also means that they may have difficulty telling you what's been happening to them. If a victim does try to tell someone about the abuse they've suffered, the fact that they're on an antipsychotic is used to dismiss their claims as mere delusions.

2. They forge records to hide lapses in care.

Nursing home attendants are supposed to document their interactions with patients, including things like when they respond to a call light and when they do a bed check to make sure a resident with dementia is safely asleep.

Instead of doing the reports as they go, however, nurses and aides often wait until the end of their shift and then "document" what they've done. Falsifying a report is so common that it's often difficult to tell when a patient's needs were ignored — except through their injuries.

3. They flat-out lie about the injuries.

You should always be suspicious when a nursing home resident suddenly falls. While falls can really happen, they are also a convenient excuse for why a patient is covered in bruises.

Other ways that nursing homes have tried to cover up abuse is by threatening victims into silence, covering their arms and legs with long clothing to hide their bruises, isolating them, and dismissing their claims to family members as a sign of dementia.

If you suspect that your loved one was abused in a nursing home, you probably won't get far on your own. A nursing home abuse attorney, however, can help you force the nursing home to turn over records and spot cover-ups and lies.