Nursing home residents raped, molested, beaten, etc :-(

So horrific! This is truly heartbreaking.

It's horrible and disgusting how often it's happening

What the fuck is wrong with people? Truly evil.

We had always heard the same...when my grandfather's dementia was to the point that he could no longer live independently, my mom and her sisters got together and decided to move him into a nursing home near two of the sisters (my mom and her sister live next door to each other and the other sister lives further away.) They set up a schedule and one of them went every day to visit. They would go at different times, help with dinner times, bring cake on birthdays...enough that they were well known by residents and staff alike. I think that it made a huge difference in the care he received. I don't think that the staff would have neglected him, but having someone coming every day meant that they were more attentive I guess. I'd like to think that it bled over to the other residents as well-with the sisters always there and interacting with all the residents meant that someone was paying attention.

Thank you. That is the way things change. By action. You have inspired me to look into this too.

Thank you for being an ombudsman. I worked doing Money Follows the Person transition and the ombudsmen were often the generators of referrals.

Even if you have children, it can still be from strangers.

This is so heartbreaking and horrific.

Obviously, there is no excuse for this kind of behavior. But I think that the system deserves some of the blame. Nursing homes are understaffed and those overworked individuals are underpaid and usually poorly trained. In my state, a lot of the nurses aides-who provide the most hands on care-have their training paid for by the state, and they do it because their state benefits depend on it, not because they have a calling. So you have people who don't really want to be there, have had about to months of training and very little on the job support. The turnover rate is crazy high. These people generally aren't abusive, but when there is no staff available, the facilities hire whoever they can get and there isn't a lot of oversight, especially overnight. For nonverbal patients, there may be no way for them to alert other staff and generally if aide A is in with Mrs. X, then the nurse is in with Mr. B and they have no idea what the other is doing.

And families tell me every week that they shouldn't have to use Dad's savings to pay for his nursing home care. Umm, who should pay, then?! We as a country have decided that health care is a privilege of the rich. Medicare pays for a 100 skilled days (give or take) of inpatient nursing care but not long term care. Who has an extra 100 grand a year to pay for nursing home care? Every day I hear ads from lawyers on how to protect your estate so the nursing home can't take all your money.

That's not to excuse neglect or abuse, but if nursing homes weren't desperate for staff, they could take only the best, those with a true calling to provide care. They could fire people who they felt didn't interact well with patients. They could have enough staff so people would be aware of what other staff was doing, instead of some times only one aide on a floor of thirty residents.

Medicare has regulations for everything we do in a nursing home/rehab facility. More (or at least different) than the hospitals. What isn't regulated is staff ratios. Nurses argue for it every year and every year, healthcare corporations lobby against it, because it's too expensive to appropriately staff. When I went from the nursing home to the hospital, I had 30 patients at the nursing home and FIVE at the hospital. The nurses at the hospital kept telling me how much sicker my hospital patients were-they had IVs and wound vacs. I had all that at the nursing home. While yes, there are a lot more acute patients in the hospital, on the day of discharge I can only have five of them in the morning but in the afternoon when they are transitioned to rehab I can have 30? They didn't get that much more stable.

And we actually had a state rep call nursing home residents "tax users" and state that her focus was on "tax payers" and so she wasn't looking into helping fix any nursing home problems. Tax users??! These are the people who paid their taxes their whole lives and helped shape our country. I have WWII vets, Korean War vets, teachers, construction workers, people who helped build and shape this country, and I'm telling them they can only have one piece of pizza at dinner because even though they pay 10k a month, we only have enough pizza for everybody to have one slice. And they get an actual shower or bath once a week because there just isn't time for more.

Most of the people I work with have been there for years and are great at what they do, but every one of us leaves at the end of the day wishing we could have done more. 90% of what I do isn't ordering a new med or test, it's just listening and being available. I cut someone's nails and she cried, because she'd been asking and asking and no one had time. That's so sad.

Makes me so sad. And angry. And this is why we lose the good staff members. I really believe that for profit health care is of the devil. When we are worried about making a profit for shareholders and paying out 7 figures to executives, there isn't money left for the frontline staff and patient care.

My brothers and I fought with my sister over where our mom should go when she needed full time care. The majority of us lived close to a very nice place but it was more expensive. My sister lived closer to this other cheaper place but it would have been harder for the rest of us to get there regularly. Thankfully reason won out and we moved mom to the place closest to more of us and she enjoyed many regular visits from more of her kids and grandkids. I think it made a huge difference in the level of care she received (even at the nice place she lived) because someone was always popping in at all times of the day and almost every day of the week to visit.

I find it appalling that these kinds of things happen to the most vulnerable people who are least able to advocate for themselves. 

My husband's father will treated the way he has treated service providers. His care will take a toll on the unfortunate ones who are assigned to him. Actually I am not sure if any of the care facilities will take him.