About this site

Defend Our Elders is a public resource about elder abuse and neglect in California, Arizona and Nevada. It is published by Justice 4 Elders, a law practice that handles nothing else.

We are not a magazine and we are not pretending to be neutral about the outcome. Our watchdog team reads the public inspection records; our lawyers take the cases those records point to. Being clear about that from the start seems better than the alternative.

What we actually do

Every quarter we download the federal inspection record for every certified nursing home in our three states — every citation, at every home, with the severity grade an inspector assigned it — along with the Medicare star ratings, staffing figures drawn from payroll data, and ownership records. We read the state licensing data alongside it. Then we write down what it says in language a worried person can use.

Where a family asks us to look up a specific home, we do that too, and we send them what we find whether or not there is a case in it.

What we will not do

We do not publish a number we cannot point you to the source of. Three figures came off this site in August 2026 for exactly that reason: a five-year staffing trend that the federal data cannot support, and a widely repeated statistic about unreported abuse that turned out to be a fifteen-year-old study of a different state, about people living at home rather than in care facilities.

We would rather have a shorter page that is true.

Getting hold of us

Call or text (888) 538-0158. Someone answers calls 8am–8pm, seven days a week, and replies to texts at any hour, day or night. It is free, it does not make anyone your lawyer, and nobody will pressure you.

If you run a facility we have written about and think we have something wrong, our corrections page explains how to reach the team directly. If you want to know how we count things, that is our editorial policy.