Nursing Home Neglects: A Brief Overview
Unfortunately, abusive behavior towards those who lived there in retirement communities, nursing centers, and other residential care facilities is recognized as nursing home neglect. Similarly, ignorance and carelessness in nursing centers mean poor amenities or duty violations, which negatively impact the residents. Furthermore, medical field scientists and healthcare experts clarify nursing home neglect as “the negligence and denial of an attendant to accomplish his or her responsibilities or duties to an older individual, such as supplying nutrition, drugs, clothing, accommodation, monitoring, medical attention, and amenities that a prudent individual would consider necessary for the better health of another.”
However, they may seem easy to understand, yet nursing home tragedies due to negligence are an ongoing issue in every state, especially in the United States. Besides, a significant percentage of caregivers do everything possible to cure senior residents with affection and professionalism. Additionally, if the older individuals positioned erratically, resulting in them to rub or pull badly and produce skin damage. Further, the breakdown of tissues accelerated, and the possibility of contamination or infection became elevated due to poor, inadequate hygiene and ventilation.
Examples of Neglect in Care Homes
- Inadequate personal hygiene
- Overview: Because older individuals do not get sufficient support and assistance to sustain personal sanitation, also their entire bodies remain dirty (e.g., clothes, teeth, skin, hair).
- Effect: Alternatively, it causes acne, infection in the skin, a strong smell, and reduced confidence.
- Nutrition Negligence
- Overview: Certainly, nursing home neglect is a most serious crime all over the world. In this category, nurses do not serve recommended amounts of nutritional needs for their better nourishment.
- Effect: Correspondingly, it leads to severe deficiencies or disorders such as malnutrition, vitamin deficiencies, dehydration, reduced weight, and critical health problems.
- Medicine Negligence
- Overview: Similarly, delaying, postponing, and failure to supply prescribed amounts of drug or inappropriate monitoring.
- Effect: The consequences of untreated medical problems may involve intensification of persistent medical conditions and elevate complications or worse, critical situations.
- Inappropriate Wound Treatment
- Overview: Mistreated infections and ulcer pressure; lack of sanitation or dressing; also not properly examining or neglecting to follow prescribed wound treatment methods.
- Effect: Aggravating of pre-existing injuries, scratches, bruises, and reduced healing infections.
- Failure to supply enough support for mobility
- Overview: Ignoring to support residents move around, relocate, utilize wheelchairs, and inappropriately apply mobility equipment may lead to a lack of mobility services.
- Effect: Greater possibility of blisters caused by pressure due to immobility, falls, and accidents
- Unhygienic living circumstances
- Overview: Leaving the residence untidy, messy, or hazardous, such as concerns like inadequate sanitation, vermin infestations, or damaged appliances.
- Effect: Probability of sufferings, wounds, and infectious diseases.
What indicators should I check out to detect abuse/neglect?
Nursing home neglect demonstrates in various manners. The most prevalent signs are:
- Prominent reduction in body weight, which is not associated with documented disorders or medical conditions.
- Psychological abandonment, pain, loneliness, and alienation
- Alternatively, stay in undesirable, unhygienic conditions with an unpleasant odor.
- Additionally, scars and injuries on their body parts, which cannot be caused by ailments such as mattress sores and exerting pressure marks,.
- Typically, having unbrushed teeth and hair, sustaining an unsatisfactory personal appearance, and wearing messy clothes.
