A Need to Change Nursing Homes

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            For many, the question of how to best care for an older family member can be tricky. Seniors are a complex demographic that consists of both incredibly able individuals and those that need more consistent attention and, in many cases, medical care. In the case of the latter, families may just not have the required skills and resources needed to adequately care for the seniors in their lives and have to delegate the responsibility to others to assure their loved one’s health and safety isn’t at risk. It’s no surprise than that many families gravitate towards nursing homes and similar institutions; the service fills an ever-growing need. Society is going through a shift where the largest generation of Americans, the baby boomers, are starting to reach senior status, a demographic consisting of adults 65 and older. With this shift it is definitely worth evaluating how these institutions as a whole treat their patients. Sadly, the data in many cases is alarming.
The most common problems of nursing homes aren’t exactly a secret. Both in media depictions to real life, nursing homes have garnered an unfortunately deserved reputation for elder abuse and neglect. Statistics show that between 1999 and 2001 nearly an entire third of all nursing homes in the country were cited for federal health violations that put seniors at risk of harm, or even more horrendously, in harm. Later in 2010, up to nearly half of all interviewed nursing home attendants admitted that they at some point abused or neglected a resident. While it can be argued that things have improved with time in these care facilities, more recent statistics can be sometimes hard to come by to prove this claim. That is because for a multitude of reasons, elder abuse is often not reported by the seniors themselves, factors such as a fear of reprisals or a general sense of helplessness preventing an accurate accounting of the issue. If this comes off as bleak it’s because it is. It is not the fault of the unfortunate that there is a need to take care of them, and while not all facilities are at fault too many are for there to be no action. It is the responsibility of the public and government to make the changes these seniors deserve to see and fortunately there has been a push in recent years to do so. It doesn’t matter how old you are, abuse is abuse and it should not be tolerated.
Work Cited:
http://www.nursinghomeabuseguide.org/
http://www.nursinghomeabuseguide.org/nursing-home-abuse-statistics/
https://www.nursinghomeabusecenter.com/

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