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In a developing story first reported by WSLS TV in Roanoke, Virginia, on Wednesday, now two former employees of the Waddell Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Galax have been arrested. They are charged with intentionally videotaping and taking photos of residents either undressing or in the nude, without the residents’ consent.
It was almost unbelievable, the reports of patients being physically and sexually abused by nursing home aides at Good Samaritan Society of Albert Lea in Minnesota. The aides said they didn’t mean any harm when they held down patients, shoved their fingers and hands in their mouths and noses to quiet their cries and screams, rubbed and hit their breasts and genitals, and sexually “humped” them. They simply called it, “work fun, or to get a good laugh.”
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued new guidance for nursing home surveyors, offering more clarification for several components of the survey that aim to improve nursing home residents’ quality of life and environment. Under these new guidelines, nursing home surveys will be focused on key areas such as ensuring residents live with dignity, offering choices in care and services, accommodating the environment to each residents’ needs and preferences, and creating a more homelike environment with access to visitors.
Florida state regulators have recently fined Azalea Court nursing home in West Palm Beach, Florida $16,000 after a patient was found on the floor with maggots crawling out of his leg cast, according to On Call with Phil Galewitz, from the Palm Beach Post.
Beasley Allen attorney J.P. Sawyer is representing the family of an Arkansas man who suffered at the hands of staff ill-equipped to care for him at the White Hall Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. The complaint alleges the nursing home facility put profits over people, misrepresenting its ability to properly care for residents in order to hold onto government funding.
Iowa Governor Chet Culver signed a bill in to law this week that removes fines imposed on nursing homes that do not meet minimum health and safety standards, according to the Des Moines Register.
Under the new law, nursing homes would no longer be fined for not having competent, licensed administrators or caregivers in their facilities; not having a qualified nurse on duty, or for understaffing at the facility, one of the leading contributors to resident neglect.
Members of the staff at Bluegrass Care and Rehabilitation Center in Lexington, Kentucky, didn’t think their joke would get out of hand. They would attach sexually explicit song lyrics to photos of residents taken with their cell phone cameras and send them as text messages to other employees. “We were just having fun,” an employee told state investigators. “Everybody was on the cell phone 24/7.”
Several staff members at a Kentucky nursing home were fired recently after an investigation found that employees had taken inappropriate photos and made audio recordings of residents at the facility, attached them to songs with sexual lyrics, and circulated them to other employees at the nursing home, according to the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader.
Nursing home advocate Wes Bledsoe wants the federal government to change the way it rates nursing homes on its Web site Medicare. gov, to accurately reflect the quality of care at nursing homes, according to the Albert Lea Tribune.
Nursing homes that serve primarily Hispanic residents provide a lower quality of care compared to nursing homes that cater to a mostly white clientele, according to a Brown University study. The research, which was recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association, looked at the rate of bedsores at nursing homes in select states and found that residents in nursing homes with a larger concentration of Hispanic residents reported having more bedsores than nursing homes with lower concentrations of Hispanic residents.
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