When our oldest relatives start to pass beyond their golden years and into a time when they need extensive care, sometimes the kindest thing that we think we can do for them is to put them in a situation where they will be cared for by a staff of professional nurses at all times. In some cases, however, this well intentioned act takes a deadly turn as nursing homes neglect and sometimes outright abuse patients.
Elder abuse and nursing home abuse are not isolated or rare phenomena. Like the shaking of babies when children cry for reasons that an overly stressed parent cannot fathom, the constant needs of the elderly can cause over worked nurses to snap. No one sets out to work in a nursing home just to abuse people, but stress and a difficult job can combine to set terrible acts in motion.
The problem with nursing homes is that they are often understaffed, with too few nurses to care for the patients. Call buttons might be ignored for quite a while as these overworked nurses rush from patient to patient just trying to get everyone’s most basic care finished with before they respond to calls. Some nursing home patients might wait hours for just a drink of water, especially if they make frequent requests like this, and might end up with bed sores from nurses without the time to turn patients regularly.
With horror stories like these, and worse stories about nurses disabling the call buttons of residents who are very needy or even patients falling out of their beds and breaking bones, you might think that you should spring for the extra money for some kind of in home care. Do not think that elder abuse happens just in professional facilities. With no one to watch them and no consequences for giving poor care, in home nursing care can be just as bad for a stressed out nurse and her patient as nursing home care can be.
The question becomes how to protect our loved ones from nursing home abuse and neglect and help them to get the best care possible. The answer is to check in often with your nursing home. While searching, keep a few things in mind for your visits, and never place an elderly relative in a nursing home that you have not paid at least one visit to in order to check things out with your own eyes.
Drop in on a few of the patients and talk to them. The more coherent ones will be able to tell you how they like living in the nursing home, and how well they are cared for. They will be grateful for the visitation, and you will be able to get a good idea of how the nursing home is run. Also talk to the people in charge to find out how many nurses are scheduled during all hours. There should not be more than a couple of patients per nurse at any time, even if this does get expensive for the facility. That standard of care is what you should be paying for.
Talk to the nurses, too, and ask them if there have been any incidents, and whether they feel that they are short staffed or well covered. You will find that many of them will be open and honest with you about staffing issues or other problems that you might not have heard about elsewhere. When you are through talking to the nurses, go to the police. Ask them if they have gotten any calls to the nursing home, and check with the hospital to see if they can tell you whether they have had to take a lot of the nursing home patients in for things like broken hips or infected bed sores.
Once you feel that you have a clear picture of a good home, help ensure that it stays that way for your loved ones. Call often to check on them, and visit them often as well. The more that the nurses see that the family is involved, the more they will see your loved one as someone worthy of care rather than just another job to be done.
You want to be able to see your family members often to make sure that they are doing well in the nursing home and that they have no complaints. Even small things should be taken seriously to prevent nursing home abuse or neglect.
Nick Johnson is lead counsel with Johnson Law Group. Johnson represents plaintiffs in many states and focuses on injury cases involving Nursing Home Abuse, Nursing Home Neglect and Negligence. Visit http://www.topnursinghomelawyers.com or call 1-888-311-5522
Tags: nursing home
Nursing homes are supposed to exist to care for the aging members of our society who are no longer able to care for themselves. They are supposed to be places of safety and security where our elderly loved ones can get the often extensive care that they need and the love and support of the staff that they desire. Unfortunately, these nursing homes have become less and less about the patient and more and more about turning a decent profit – or a more than decent profit.
One of the biggest drains on the finances of any business can be the employees, and the more highly trained and well educated these employees are, the more expensive they are to keep in employ.
A nurse is a highly trained medical professional, and are essential to the safe and proper running of a good nursing home. Unfortunately, the more focused these nursing homes get on money and on profit, the fewer nurses each shift seems to have until the remaining nurses are trying to do the work of twice their number.
These skeleton crews of nurses are simply unable to keep up with the demands of caring for our elderly relatives and for their invalid patients. They might find themselves taking shortcuts due to the nursing home’s negligence, desperately trying to keep up with the endless work of caring for people too old or too sick to care for themselves.
These nurses quickly become burned out, with many of them quitting or transferring into new fields to escape the physical and emotional stresses of working under these conditions.
The more nurses leave the nursing homes, the more the homes try to make do with fewer and fewer capable hands to do the work. These nursing homes become hotbeds of neglect and abuse, all in the name of turning a profit at the expense of the health and well being of the patients that the system was created to care for.
Nursing home patients are frequent victims of this terrible nursing home negligence, and little is done about the dangers that they face until truly horrible harm is done or patients die because of the negligence of the nursing home owners. Not only do exhausted and overworked nurses become more prone to aggressive or angry behaviors like neglect and abuse, but they also become prone to human error.
Incorrect medications or incorrect doses might be given by nurses who are working too many hours and doing too much work for their bodies to handle, causing painful complications and even death to the patients.
For too long, we have stood aside and hoped that the system would improve on its own, and the system has continued to get worse. As nursing homes realize that there are few to no consequences for behaving in a negligent fashion, they realize that they can get away with their terrible behavior without modification for the better. Occasionally one of them will get tagged with a lawsuit, however the huge profits that they have been turning help them to take care of settlements without any problems. The lack of consequences might even make them more bold in their negligent activities.
The time for letting these nursing homes get away with their neglectful behavior is over. It is up to us to stand up for the victims of these crimes of neglect and abuse and help the victims find their voices in the legal system. Anyone who has had to watch a loved one suffer from the aftermath of nursing home neglect or abuse knows the pain that they are going through.
It is time for these families to band together to stand up to the greedy nursing home owners and managers and make them stand accountable for their actions. The abuse will not stop until we stop it, and nursing home abuse lawyers can help us make this stand against the corporate profiteering mentality.
With the aid of a nursing home abuse lawyer, families of the victims of this terrible crime can make the nursing home owners pay for the suffering that they cause their patients through their negligence. They will be forced to deal with the consequences of their actions, and a big enough hit to their purses might even cause them to reconsider their impersonal and impractical approach to heal care for the elderly.
It is in our power to end nursing home negligence if only the families of the victims stand up and fight together for the justice that should be theirs.
Nick Johnson is lead counsel with Johnson Law Group. Johnson represents plaintiffs in many states and focuses on injury cases involving Nursing Home Abuse, Nursing Home Neglect and Negligence. Visit http://www.topnursinghomelawyers.com or call 1-888-311-5522
Tags: nursing home
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