› $580,975,000 verdict in personal injury case
Social workers play an important role in nursing homes, serving as an advocate for patients. However few are properly trained for the jobs they hold, according to the Iowa City Press Citizen, which referenced a national study on nursing home social workers.
Canadian officials blame inadequate staff-to-patient ratios for overworking, under training and simply frustrating Nova Scotia nursing home staff members, causing them to be abusive to their patients, according to The Canadian Press. As a result, 30 incidents of physical, financial or emotional abuse by staff members were reported over a one-year period.
“We realized that he wouldn’t live forever but we didn’t think he would die of bed sores,” says a family member of 79-year-old William Taylor of Wee County, Scotland, to the Wee County News.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services last week posted a new system on its Web site, Nursing Home Compare, that rates all Medicare- and Medicaid-certified nursing homes with a five-star system.
Measuring the quality of a nursing home is not always clear-cut. More that 1.5 million people live in 15,000 nursing homes throughout the country. Each facility is inspected annually and must meet federal standards in order to participate in Medicaid and Medicare. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has established the site to give the public a better understanding of how nursing homes compare to others.
Most people don’t want to even think that their parents have having sex – much less their grandparents. However, researchers from Kansas State say that physical and sexual intimacy is alive and well in many nursing homes and caregivers should be trained on how to handle situations that arise, according to The Hays Daily News.
The 75-year-old woman with diabetes and dementia who is recovering at the state-run Emily P. Bissell Hospital, a skilled nursing facility in Delaware, after fracturing her leg after a fall in January 2007, told her visiting nieces that staff members were mean to her. Those family members also noted signs of neglect in personal hygiene of their ailing aunt, and secretly installed a hidden video surveillance camera to keep watch on their aunt, according to Delaware Online. The $600 motion-sensitive video camera showed staff yelling and slapping the hands and face of the bedridden aunt while she pleaded for help.
An Office of Health Facility Complaints Investigative Report by the Minnesota Department of Public Health dated May 7, 2008, revealed that three of the residents who were abused by employees at the Good Samaritan Society nursing home in Albert Lea, Minn., in the much-publicized “abuse-for-thrills” case are deceased.
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 Washington, D.C.-area emergency room doctor fed up with seeing so many patients from one area nursing home sick from obvious neglect, spoke to ABC 7/News Channel 8 to warn others of the poor care offered at the home.
The doctor said he routinely sees patients from Grand Park Care Center on the verge of death with serious conditions ranging from acute kidney problems, severe pneumonia and malnutrition. He said the conditions indicate neglect by caregivers.
Iowa lawmakers who complain about state inspectors being overly aggressive in their surveys of nursing homes have been receiving thousands of dollars in contributions from nursing home officials, according to the Chicago Tribune.
