subject: Nursing Home Abuse And Corporate Profits (what Leads To Nursing Home Abuse?) [print this page] In their quest to increase profit margins, there are some nursing home owners who may decide that they need to substantially reduce the staff at their facilities. Consequently, many of our neediest and sickest citizens - the residents of these nursing homes - end up becoming terribly neglected.
Neglect is one of the many forms of nursing home abuse, and many elderly residents of these facilities may be at an increased risk of needlessly suffering from it as a result of these cuts in staff.
It may sound crazy to even assume that people who have gone to school for many years to learn how to provide the proper care for nursing home residents could be the ones who are now neglecting them. But that is sometimes the reality of the situation.
For example, nursing home caregivers may become burned out because they are being overworked and underpaid. They may be asked tend to more patients than they have the ability and time to properly care for, yet receive no support from their managers. And their mangers are sometimes the very people who have caused the problem by taking the foundation out from under the nursing home staff when they downsized the workforce.
I'd like you to put yourself in the shoes of a nursing home caregiver for a moment. Imagine that a big part of your job is to take care of elderly patients.
Suppose that some of these people have become unable to care for themselves or are now incoherent. They are elderly and, after having been very successful in their lives, they have to now must be cared for like you would care for an infant.
However, the one thing that they seem to know how to do is to press the call button. And they seem to press that call button incessantly.
On top of these responsibilities, your company has been working you for very long hours - considerably more than forty hours per week - and it's been going on week after week for a very long time.
Do you think that under this scenario that you may feel burned out and angry?
It shouldn't be surprising then that many of those who entered into the nursing home field in order to help other people should end up becoming exhausted and burned out. Or they quit within only a couple of years and simply go into another line of work.
Worst yet, some of these workers take out their frustration and their anger on the very people who can least defend themselves - the patients that they are supposed to be taking care of every day.
If you have a relative or a loved one in a nursing home and you suspect that they are being abused, don't you think that you should hold the corporation that owns the nursing home and the offending staff responsible for the abuse?
