When seeking a decent nursing home to place my Mother in, I searched the government website in order to compare them and read the Inspection Reports performed by the State. Most all of them have the same infractions. I can't understand how the nursing homes aren't held to a higher standard of care for our Seniors. Many are so dependent on being fed, transferred, bathe, etc. and majority of the nursing homes have inadequate staff to do a decent job.
I am seeking information of what we can possibly do to voice our concerns to make positive changes in care at the nursing homes and hold them accountable. If anyone has any information, please share that information with us. Thank you.
I've had occasion to visit in about 4 different facilities over the last couple of months. My dad and a friend were in rehab in nursing homes, plus, my cousin is in an MC connected to regular AL. I have been quite surprised to see how well they appeared and how good they seemed to function. Clean, clean, clean and no smells. Staff pleasant, alert, attentive and available. This is NC.
Today's seniors are far sicker than seniors were even 20 years ago. Today's seniors have more diabetes, more overweight and obesity, more heart disease, more brain disease, more frailty, etc. The top 15 percent of the sickest elderly use 80 percent of health care resources. They are enormously expensive and yet their quality of life is worse than the sickest seniors of 20 years ago.
Nursing homes are better today than they were 20 years ago and yet still remain very sad places. Our society keeps our elderly alive artificially or performing heroic acts of resuscitation on their frail, lifeless bodies instead of letting them go when their body has given out. Our society puts pacemakers into people with Alzheimer's as if that's going to improve their quality of life by extending its quantity. That all has ramifications including them living for years in a nursing home. It's all very sad.
Rather than point fingers at the nursing home staff who are underpaid and are short staffed and are abused by residents whose brains are hopelessly broken, "positive changes" must first come from within the family unit, which is the building block of society. Individuals and families must also be held accountable. Not everything that is wrong with nursing homes is the fault of the staff.
Be the change you want to see in the nursing home. Volunteer. Get involved in your local council on aging. Advocate for nursing homes. Do something to help an already established organization in your community do better. Do the little things and the big things will start to take care of themselves.
Based on experience, I know that we were naïve and inexperienced when we first began our long journeys, but as we waded through them, we learned, especially to inspect facilities before using them, and how to interact with people who are underpaid in order to accomplish our goals.
Ideally, we should be able to contact our elected reps and get support, if only for public hearings addressing the situations and potential solutions. But, unfortunately, we're living in far from normal times.
AARP does involve itself in monitoring, but like everyone else, it can only do so much.
I think organizations of individuals, perhaps with some corporate support, could eventually become effective, especially if boycotts of noncompliant facilities were considered. But grass roots organizations take a while to implement, and this caregiving field is not one which allows much outside time for lobbying.
I don't know of potential answers, or even if there are any good ones. Caregiving is a field which I believe has mushroomed and exploded, with guidelines and Medicare oversight, but a lot is still left to families to figure out and battle on our own.
I wish there were some better solutions though.
Period.
It's always been this way in the care giver industry too. The residents are charged a fortune yet the care giving staff is paid a pittance. Sad but true.