What Is Nursing Home Abuse?
Nursing home abuse is any form of abuse that happens in long-term care facilities with people living there. This includes physical or mental injury, sexual harassment, financial misuse, and perhaps other violence.
Families put their faith in nursing homes to look after their loved ones. However, nursing homes do not necessarily offer residents with healthy conditions.
News of the beatings, sexual attacks, abuse, and swindling in nursing homes have become national headlines in recent times.
Many of these concerns arise from the nursing workers — the same individuals working to offer treatment — or from others. Others stem from major insurance firms, who could neglect adequate training for workers and other safety controls at tenants' cost.
These issues don't seem to go away in a short period of time. In fact, it is predicted that, one out of five people in the U.S. will be 65 and older by 2030. They will need nursing home care.
Types of Nursing Home Neglect
Neglect may entail a caregiver not delivering multiple forms of treatment to an elderly person, often covering four broad categories.
- Neglect of basic needs: This type of negligence is the inability of a nursing home to provide a patient with adequate food, water, or a healthy space.
- Neglect of personal hygiene: This can be defined as the inability of a nursing home to help a patient better manage health, such as dental treatment, cleaning, and washing.
- Medical neglect: This means that a treatment provider does not adequately treat or avoid the care needs of a patient. Diabetic treatment, skin infections, allergies, mobility issues, and other complications may occur due to such neglect.
- Social or emotional neglect: This may include leaving the resident, causing them to go too far away, persistent unkindness, and other shortcomings to offer adequate emotional and practical support.
Signs of Nursing Home Abuse
Signs of nursing home abuse may include:
- Broken bones or wounds
- Bruising, marks or injuries
- Bedsores
- Recurrent infections
- Marks of Dehydration
- Mood fluctuations and uncontrollable outbreaks
- Reclusiveness or unwillingness to talk
- Unwillingness to eat medicines
- Weight loss for no reason
- Weak physical appearance or deficiency of sanitation
- Alterations in mental state
- Caregivers who don't want to leave patients alone with their families.
- Not every patient with these symptoms has been exposed to neglect in nursing homes, but all signs should be considered for more study.
Common Causes of Nursing Home Abuse
Several reasons may be taken into account as sources of nursing home abuse or violence. Many of these are caused by issues with nursing workers or the organizations operating the hospitals.
- Staff workers may have long hours a day working, which can affect the residents' needs. Any staff members may either physically or verbally discredit residents instead of addressing their concerns more healthily.
- Most nursing home tenants have been working tirelessly for retirement and even beyond. Personnel who is close to a resident would want to defraud this saving in their lifetime and use it for their personal benefit.
- A lack of monitoring can lead workers to be unaware of what a resident might do for days on end.
- When a nursing home is under-employed, new staff can get very frustrating. A smaller ratio of nurses to patients can affect enormously on the overall health care delivered.
- Multiple nursing homes and businesses also aim to increase revenue, which may contribute to various issues. For instance, a nursing care home may employ workers who have less experience and cannot educate or supervise them appropriately, thereby raising the risk of abuse.
Regardless of the reason for the neglect in nursing homes, there is no justification for it. Every resident of a nursing home should enjoy a healthy life – but some go the opposite way.
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