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Nursing home officials did nothing to stop a male resident at a La Salle County, Illinois nursing home from sexually abusing 10 female patients and sexually soliciting several others, according to allegations in a report from the Illinois Department of Public Health.
The 87-year-old nursing home resident likely meant no harm. He suffers from dementia and wouldn’t give a belt used to assist residents with walking back to certified nursing assistant Sharoia D. Hill. But Hill became frustrated with his aggressive behavior. She decided to remedy the situation by hitting the frail man with a closed fist. Now the 28-year-old nursing aide faces up to five years in prison on a Class 3 felony charge, according to The News-Gazette.
Wandering is a common symptom of Alzheimer’s disease, dementia or other cognitive disorders. According to the Alzheimer’s Association more than 60 percent of those with the condition wander at some point and up to 70 percent of those who wander will do so again. More than 127,000 critical wandering incidents are reported each year. If not found within the first 24 hours, up to half of all persons with dementia who wander will become seriously injured or die, according to research obtained by the Alzheimer’s Association.
State Sen. Dan Kotowski said he had good intentions when he sponsored a bill in the Illinois General Assembly that would refund fines paid by nursing homes that promised to use the money to improve care at their facilities. But opponents of the bill say it is faulty and would only “eliminate the financial disincentive for bad behavior,” according to the State Journal-Register.
DuPage County, Illinois officials are stepping up their investigations into allegations of physical abuse of elderly in nursing homes and in-home health care settings, spurred in part by the horrifying story of a nursing home resident who froze to death last month after wandering outside her nursing home, according to the Chicago Tribune.
An investigation into the death of Sarah Wentworth has taken an even more tragic turn. The 89-year-old woman was found dead outside in her Itasca, Illinois nursing home’s courtyard earlier this month wearing nothing but a hospital gown. Since she suffered from dementia, which can make its victims prone to wandering, she wore an ankle bracelet that would trigger an alarm if she crossed the threshold to the outdoors. So why didn’t anyone seem to know how Wentworth wandered out in the first place?
The family of Sarah Wentworth can’t imagine how the 89-year-old woman could have wandered outside the Itasca, Illinois nursing home where she lived for more than two years. Wentworth was so frail that she needed assistance just to get out of bed or change her clothes. And since she suffered from dementia, which can make those who suffer from the disease prone to wander, she also wore an ankle bracelet that sounded an alarm if she crossed through the nursing home’s doors to the outside.
John Whalen visited 87-year-old Bernice Mulch weekly at a Jacksonville, Ill., nursing home. Whalen, who had legal authority over the woman’s care, had no reason to believe that his friend was not getting adequate care. After she passed away, the Morgan County coroner investigated her death and determined that that Mulch’s death was caused by a nursing home staff member’s failure to follow doctor’s orders to give her antibiotics for an arm infection. As a result, the nursing home was fined $10,000 by the state, according to the State Journal-Register.
A truly disturbing report out of Illinois this week. A series of suspicious deaths at a Chicago-suburban nursing home in 2006, the so-called “mercy killings” of one nurse, now appear to be ruthless murders committed by a caregiver who became “fed up” with certain patients.
This week, members of the U.S. Senate will consider a bill that will establish a nationwide system of background checks for individuals who apply for jobs at long-term care facilities, The Daily Times (Farmington, New Mexico) reported today. If passed, the Patient Safety and Abuse Prevention Act would allow nursing homes to choose not to hire potentially abusive caregivers based on a coordinated system of checks against abuse and neglect registries, state police records and the FBI national database of criminal history records.
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