Personal Injury Law

Abuse at Nursing Home by Teens

By Beth Janicek

In a horribly shocking story reported yesterday, two teen-age girls are accused of abusing nursing home residents, with four other girls accused of failure to report the abuse. The girls worked as nursing aids in the afternoons and were hired to perform tasks such as brushing the residents’ hair and teeth or helping the residents who suffer from Alzheimer and dementia with other daily tasks. Unfortunately, instead of helping these vulnerable people, they taunted and tortured them. The police report lists horrible abuse such as spitting on the patients, sticking their fingers in the elderly victims’ mouth until they would scream, and several other appalling acts.

On the surface, these girls appeared to be normal high-school students, but something is obviously not normal with their moral sense of right and wrong, and they failed people who were relying on and trusting them. How do we protect our elderly friends and family, especially when appearances can be so deceiving? A good start is to research long-care facilities. Medicare.gov has guidelines on their website on what to look for when deciding on a long-care facility for a loved one. Also look for state-specific websites where there may be postings of individual nursing home investigations by the state. For Texas, go to the Attorney General’s website for more information. Another helpful research tool is the sex offender’s database. Many people do not realize that a sex offender could be living in a nursing home as a resident. Check the addresses of nursing homes on the DPS Sex Offender Registry database to make sure there are no offenders living in the nursing home with a loved one. In addition, talk to the staff, talk to the other residents and their family. There’s no perfect guarantee, but with education and action maybe we can help stop future abuse.

Full post as published by San Antonio Personal Injury Lawyer on December 05, 2008 (boomark / email).