Any suggestions regarding stricter background checks for assisted living and in-home attendants?
My family member has had extensive identity theft. It has been a complete nightmare. It turns out that a couple of CNA attendants that were hired from an attendant company to come in their home have extensive criminal backgrounds. It looks like they are part of a crime ring. When the attendant company was asked what kind of background check they performed, they said they only checked records with DPS. We were told if they had checked finger prints, all of their records would come up, even nationwide and not just in Texas. I was also told that the state of Texas only requires a statewide background check. With many attendants just moving here from another state, it should be required by the state to do a nationwide background check. Does anyone have any suggestions of who to send letters and a petition to require finger print background checks for everyone working at these in home care agencies? Also, ideally I would like there to be an automatic recheck of backgrounds by the state so people who have stolen or have serious charges of intentional crime / theft, etc should loose their CNA license and other direct care licenses. Does anyone have experience or suggestions of how to get these changes to happen? Thank you in advance!
If anybody knows how to make a screening system work without severely depleting an already pressurised workforce they should copy their ideas to every government in the civilised world. It'd be worth a fortune.
Here in the UK we set up the CRB - Criminal Records Bureau - about ?fifteen ?twenty years ago. This morphed into the Disclosure and Barring Service about ?five years ago. Both bodies were dizzyingly expensive to set up and run, and are extremely effective at deterring volunteers, complicating recruitment, escalating the price of family events and mistaking entirely blameless individuals for convicted felons*.
The government still doesn't know who lives in the country, what their names are, where they're working or what forged documents, stolen documents, stolen identities and other means are being used to circumvent the system.
I'm afraid it will always be down to individuals, families, communities and employers to inform themselves and monitor those they are responsible for safeguarding.
In the case of your family member, the company has met the guidelines, yes? So the company has not been negligent; the guidelines are not good enough. You need to find out who sets the standards, then you need to find out whether they are under review, then you need to bring pressure to bear to extend the range of checks included. I wish you the very best of luck.
And I hope the rat-bag thieving b*st*rds who stole from your family member, failed to provide the care they contracted to provide (which actually is the central point), and turned that person's peaceful life into a Kafkaesque nightmare... well, I hope they burn.
*Very rarely, a tiny percentage of checks carried out. But if that 0.01% or whatever includes you, you don't think it's negligible.