Why Nursing Homes Have The Reputation They Do
It would be unfair to say that the nursing home concept suffers from poor reputation. Most people think that these places are something out of a Dickens novel and tell themselves that they would never want their loved ones placed in nursing homes ever. Why do people think these things about nursing homes when many clearly do a great job nursing the elderly and the sick to health?
One important reason for this could be how the doctors and nurses in these places can be somewhat careless about their reliance on pharmaceutical products to help with difficult problems. For instance, difficult high-maintenance patients are often simply treated with psychoactive medications to make them more manageable. These patients can suffer all kinds of extremely alarming side effects
There is a reason why these places are unwilling to deal the right way with difficult patients though. Nursing homes tend to be completely understaffed in America. They have fewer nurses, nurses?aides and other support staff then they need. And it's a perennial problem. Nursing homes are typically about 20% understaffed.
A nurse or a nurse抯 aide at a nursing home should typically be in charge of no more than three patients. There certainly is a lot of work to do ?feeding, taking them to the bathroom, dressing them, bathing them and so on. In some of the more severely understaffed nursing homes though, there could be one registered nurse in charge of 50 patients. You can imagine why nursing homes have a bad reputation for the kind of care patients get there.
And yet, for such understaffed care, you have to pay about $100,000 a year for private room and $75,000 a year for semiprivate one. At least that's what you would have to pay you didn't have insurance. If you didn't have it, about 20% of that would come out of your pocket. Add to that how most nursing home residents complain about how the support staff steal from them, and it adds considerably to the bill.
A new Patient Safety and Abuse Prevention Act has just been passed into law should help. The law requires that every nursing home employee be vetted with background checks. But there's nothing that the law can do about outright fraud by the accountants and the clerks and other such people. There have been many reported cases where accountants and clerks have managed to forge checks and steal money from nursing home accounts. Perhaps you're beginning to see now why people don't really trust that nursing homes can be good places to go to.
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