Posted on 11/21/2011 5:27:15 PM PST by stillafreemind
In the maggot and sexual abuse stories, there was one common denominator. The aides/workers were not allowed to speak out about violations without losing their jobs. They were not allowed to talk about it or to contact the families. Nurses aides are the backbone of nursing home care. They know the patients better than anyone, but they cannot divulge heinous acts of neglect and abuse. To break this rule could mean the loss of their jobs. Silence or loss of job is a hard choice to make.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
This just makes me sick.
nurses’ aids can always make anonymous complaints.
The children of the elderly bear responsibility for what happens to them, when they decide to dump them off at the nursing homes, without doing their due diligence.
Just part of the Medicaid/Medicare Death panels. Can cut costs if the old folks just die off through selective neglect.
Many of the elderly in nursing homes are there at younger ages because they have no children. They didn’t value settling down and raising kids.
In the next seversl decades, the number of elderly who even have progeny will continue to drop drastically.
Compound this with those who never raised the children they did have. They cut out on their marriages, or shuffled the kids off to one daycare or little league or babysitter after another. Then they left them home alone to fend for themselves. Latchkey parenting earns a latchkey old age.
Legal oversight becomes more necessary when management and personal responsibility have failed. Establishing and maintaining a workforce (nurses, aides and everyone else)whose members feel personal responsibility is part of the job of management. Establishing and maintaining proper management is the job of the owner of the facility.
“Fines seem to be the standard way of handling nursing home infractions. Is it time to adapt new laws for these violations?”
It depends. If the problems are caused by a poor financial situation due to insufficient income, fines will only aggravate the situation. If the fines are considered to be just a cost of doing business, levying fines won't help that much. The problem here is coming up with new laws that would actually help instead of adding to the problems.
“They trust that the nursing staffs and administrators have the patients well-being in mind, not the facilities bottom line.”
The bottom line is important, and maintaining a decent bottom line is necessary, but maximizing the bottom line should not be the point of the effort. Most every endeavor has business aspects, but not every endeavor is a business foremost. I believe one of the problems with much of the medical profession is that it is run as a business, not as a profession.
Yes there are hotlines to report elder abuse
Or many of them were SOBs to their family, and so the latter don’t feel obligated to do them any favors.
Based on all information I’ve gleaned, nursing home residents are mostly (over 70%) white women. There are far fewer men and non-white people.
Several years ago our father was assigned to a skilled nursing home to recover from his heart attack. We were shocked that all the patients seemed to be drugged up. It was like a mental facility in the dining hall. The nursing facility, the hospital and the insurance company later claimed that the patients were *all* senile.
There shouldn’t be 100% senility in a skilled nursing home. We saw what kind of sedatives they were trying to give our dad. We were pretty sure that they were keeping the patients sedated so that they would be easier to care for while they were collecting money from the insurance companies.
We pulled our father out of there early the first night and took him home.
He recovered quickly at home, but said later he was scared for his life, that the nursing home was a “hell hole” and he wasn’t sure what would have happened if we had kept him there — they might have kept him there drugged up until he died in order to collect the insurance money.
Do your research on local nursing facilities early — on the Internet and in person — before you or a loved one is forced into one.
Does anyone know if there is extra insurance that people can buy that can be applied to upgrades in the quality of nursing homes when they are needed in the future?
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We mentioned in another thread on here that elder suicide should be discouraged. In some cases though, maybe it’s not such a bad idea...
Generally, one reaps what was sown...
There are millions of couples in this country who don’t have children because of infertility.
You should never speculate about the reasons for anyone’s childless situation — or talk uninformed nonsense about their ‘values.’
From the little I have seen, most of the people in the nursing homes seem like they have been good parents.
It is the kids who are neglecting their duties, whose lives are too busy with work and raising kids to bring the parents into their houses. It is almost always the grown off-spring who are fault. They can’t be bothered.
Most parents are good. They aren’t perfect, but almost all of them have done their very best.
I’m sorry that some people feel resentment that they were latch-key kids. How terrible that must have been to have parents working so hard that the kids had to let themselves into the house.
It is disappointing to see people finding faults with their parents and using even the slightest of faults from the past as excuses to subject their helpless parents to the living hell found in nursing homes.
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I hope your own children don't treat you like you are treating your parents.
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Interesting...as I was growing up, many of my friends had grandparents living with them...they had a room, or an apartment on the house. When did it become the norm to have parents go to nursing homes instead of live with their parents?
So guess what will be the remedy, more regulation. I know of a case of regulation gone amok nearly endangering the lives of all the patients at a hospice. The owners were hit with a bounty hunter audit and the hospice had all of its payments frozen. The owner freaked and nearly had to lay off her entire staff. Just think of that, a bunch of dying patients spending their last days in beds soiled with urine and stool and without pain meds. Fortunately, they somehow made it through and the hospice was fined $500 for some egregious transgression I suppose.
But it seems that these old and sick people are just at the end of the ‘complete lives system’ curve and deserve to be liquidated according the compassionate progressives.
Many did the least they could legally get away with.
Quite a lot did things that should have gotten them arrested, but their children loved them and would have denied everything at the time.
And those two incomes? Many were to buy luxuries for the parents, not necessities. You can ditch trying to find nobility in that. It isn't there. A new second and third car every two years or a boat or a house with three extra rooms isn't needed. Parents can buy those things and still not get braces to straiten their children's teeth or chip in for college.
But when they get to the nursing home those same people drone on about the sacrifices they imagine they made. And how they loved the children they don’t know and never visited after they fled the nest.
If they do not, it will be because she treated them different. What goes around comes around, both ways.
Which was her point.
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