If you have to go into a nursing home tomorrow for any reason — whether you’re looking at a short stint following a hip replacement or long-term care — your odds of being abused might be as high as 30 percent.
If you think that sounds awful, it actually sounds even worse when you look closer at the figures behind that statistic:
- The statistic was drawn from a report to Congress that studied over 5,000 nursing homes for a two-year period.
- Nearly 9,000 acts of abuse were recorded during that time.
- A total of 1,601 incidents of abuse put the victim in immediate danger of death or serious injury.
- Administrators and others say that the numbers are just “inflated” because of overly-strict reporting regulations.
In fact, experts in the field say that nursing homes are being given a bad rap by all these governmental studies and regulations that capture incidents of abuse and catalog them. They feel that nursing facilities are giving patients the best possible care they can, and there’s a little too much fuss being made over alleged incidents of abuse.
Lest you be tempted to believe that the facilities are burdened with unnecessary regulations that require them to report mere triflings, those same experts feel that things like one patient slapping another are “minor” issues that shouldn’t have to be reported.
It’s rather hard to imagine that the victim of such an attack also feels the incident is minor.
Some of the abuse uncovered in the study is outright horrifying. Staff members were caught kicking, punching, slapping and choking residents. Bones and noses were broken. In one case, a member of the staff bribed one patient to deliberately injure another.
In addition, some of the staff members of these nursing homes don’t seem to have an ounce of human compassion toward their victims. There have been increasing incidents of staff members sharing pictures of the patients they’ve abused on social media. They apparently compare their handiwork with that of other staff members, in other nursing homes, on other victims.
There’s no such thing as a minor incident of nursing home abuse or negligence. Victims are 300 percent more likely to die than those who aren’t mistreated. That makes it imperative to take action at the first hint of abuse to protect your loved one.
Source: Axcess News, “Report: Nursing Home Abuse Occurs in 1-in-3 Nursing Homes,” Melissa Thompson, Dec. 26, 2017
