About Nursing Home Abuse

With millions of elderly persons, dependant adults and even children being admitted to nursing homes each year, many nursing homes owners have put the importance of the bottom line before the importance of the care and welfare of these residents.

By the time a person finds themselves in a nursing home, they have usually reached a sense of helplessness and are insecure about themselves and their future. These people, for the most part, have worked a long life and only hope that they can leave this world with a little bit of respect and dignity. It is bad enough that these people loose control of their bodily functions and motor skills, but being the victim of abuse, whether it be physical, verbally, sexually or emotionally, is more than any of these people deserve.

Many nursing homes are dangerously understaffed. In the year 2000, Florida led the nation in the number of nursing homes operating short staffed. Nursing home supporters would have you believe these nursing homes cannot afford to hire additional employees, but they can afford to pump thousands of dollars into high-priced lobbyists. Every day, nursing home residents are suffering and dying from malnutrition and dehydration, not as a consequence of their medical condition, but because the nursing homes do not hire enough staff to feed them. In many cases, nursing home staff were often found eating the residents’ food! The bottom line is that they CAN afford to staff these nursing homes - they just elect not to.

Not only are the nursing homes understaffed, many of the employees are poorly trained. Unfortunately, the nursing home industry attracts minimum wage workers with minimum skills which eventually leads to cases of abuse and neglect.

Almost all facilities have cases of being short staffed, being unable to regularly check and rotate patients to prevent pressure sores, letting patients lie in their own urine and/or feces for extended periods of time, having lazy employees and having employees that have seen something in which they did not agree with.