The nursing home industry is continually faced with challenges. These challenges come in the form of ever-changing regulations, declining profits, and staff shortages. Of course, these factors can lead to inadequate care, as staff are expected to perform more complex treatments with fewer resources. Nursing homes try to provide different areas in the facility for residents to move around.
Still, it's likely that your older parents are transitioning their home to smaller homes than they're used to. This easy-to-read guide covers 25 common problems faced by residents and their families in nursing homes. These problems occur in nursing homes across the country. Even supposedly “good” nursing homes often follow procedures that violate federal laws and harm residents.
Knowing your rights and having the tools to force or pressure nursing home staff and management to comply with the law can make a difference. Usually, in a nursing home, there may be some major problems that could cause harm to your loved one. This includes physical abuse, mental abuse, financial abuse, malnutrition, and neglect. Find out more about each of them below.
This is exactly what it sounds like: physical abuse of the elderly, which involves hitting, pushing and other acts that can cause the elderly to suffer physical harm. Often, the abuse is done in a way that nursing home staff members believe hides the evidence of the abuse. For family members of older people, it's important to recognize what can happen, how it affects your loved one, what to look for, and how you can report physical abuse. They all belong to the same category and, although they do not cause physical harm, they can affect the way your loved one acts and other aspects, such as hunger and quality of life.
It usually occurs in situations where staff insult the elderly, tell them things that degrade them, and threaten to physically abuse them. Mental abuse can often be worse than physical abuse because of the fear and anxiety that many people develop. This can cause long-term problems and change the way an individual acts in the place where they should feel most comfortable. Financial abuse can occur when these individuals gain the trust of the elderly and steal from the older resident in a way that results in significant financial loss.
In many cases, this can include stealing money directly from your property or accessing your bank account. You want to know that your older loved one is getting nutritious meals and anything else they need. If you notice that your loved one is experiencing significant weight loss while in a nursing home, there may be a malnutrition problem. The more weight your loved one loses, the greater the risk of serious problems, such as pressure sores, health problems, and more.
Malnutrition is a serious problem and, if left unremedied, can even cause deadly harm to older people. Many nursing homes have a staff-to-resident ratio that is well below established standards and puts people in the nursing home at risk of neglect. When staff members don't have time to provide individualized care, it may be easy for them to overlook a resident who may need specific help. When that help and care are not provided, it can be considered neglect and the elderly can be harmed.
Family members don't just need to recognize potential signs of financial abuse when they have a loved one in a nursing home. The biggest underlying problem? Despite the billions of taxpayer dollars that the United States spends on a system aimed at caring for elderly and fragile residents, not enough money is being invested in care itself, according to interviews with more than a dozen researchers, advocates, industry representatives and staff members of nursing homes. Few federal measures assess quality of life in institutions, the home and the community. The quality of life in nursing homes has long been a major concern.
While federal regulations include residents' rights, quality of life violations are often overshadowed (and not sanctioned) by quality of care issues (for example,. Safety and pressure (ulcers) that residents face, 71. Efforts to reimagine livable environments, services and quality of life are lacking. At home and in the community, quality of life is an important area to measure, although it is often a more complex question than long-term services and supports, requiring new measures, such as the number of people and the amount of institutional spending compared to. Community Environments, 72. The degree of integration, independence and community access available to beneficiaries in different community settings are important measures.
The measures could assess not only whether people receive services in the community, but also whether they are in the environment that provides them with the highest degree of integration and independence from the community, such as measures related to social activity and participation, 73. State survey bodies only confirmed 7 out of 134 incidents of nursing home abuse or neglect in the reports. One of the advantages that nursing homes promote is that their older parents will be with other residents in their age group, so they can interact and make friends. In the most extreme cases, doctors who care for nursing home patients, as well as death certificates consulted by Human Rights Watch, suggest that these conditions may have contributed to the deaths. Staff said that being confined and isolated in their rooms meant less physical activity for nursing home residents.
The survey was not intended to capture a representative sample of family members living in nursing homes and, therefore, cannot be used to generalize about the experiences of nursing home residents in the U.S. But the results are largely based on the stories of people interviewed by Human Rights Watch. Several family members of residents in other nursing homes expressed concern that other types of injuries had not been fully or adequately treated either. Therefore, the information presented below only represents the experiences of those surveyed and is not representative of the experiences of nursing home residents in the U.S.
UU. This report would not have been possible without the generosity, honesty and courage of people living in nursing homes, their families, their advocates and nursing home staff. As the nursing home industry has consolidated in recent years, with more acquisitions by large corporations and Wall Street investors, the ownership structure and finances of many centers have become increasingly complex and opaque. The extent of psychotropic drug use in nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic is unclear, not least because the relaxation of data reporting requirements on drug use and the absence of monitoring and visits in centers eliminated key sources of information on this topic.
Take time to build trust and friendship between your loved one, staff, residents, and nursing home family members. Under international human rights law, all people, including residents of nursing homes, have the right to the highest attainable standard of health and to an effective remedy in the event of a violation of their rights. They also found that if staff had been able to administer intravenous therapy, a whopping 70% of hospitalized patients could have received treatment at the nursing home (The Henry J. While the pandemic brought nursing homes to the forefront, Americans have historically been reluctant to address the problem of caring for the elderly.
Many of the elderly people in nursing home centers are in control of their finances, but they are also vulnerable to those around them, including staff members, other residents, and even some family members who visit. . .
