As a grown child with aging parents, you may have the common experience of navigating the unfamiliar role reversal where you switch from your parents caring for you to you caring for your parents. For many people, this is a strange stage of life to manage for multiple reasons.
You may experience a wide range of emotions switching your mindset to being responsible for the care of your aging parents or any close relatives. Those emotions can affect your ability to balance options and make rational decisions.
Should your parents’ health require more care than you and your family provide, you may have to find the highest quality nursing home care to provide that increased, regular care to your parents.
As someone who is responsible for selecting nursing home care for an aging adult, you will need to learn how to make that choice so that your loved one is receiving the best possible care available.
Ensuring Health And Safety in a Nursing Home
Nursing homes are often evaluated and monitored to be following strict guidelines, policies, and procedures to ensure the highest quality care for this vulnerable population.
There are also questions you can ask as you seek nursing home care that will help you understand what precautions will be taken to protect your loved one.
Medicare.gov has put together a comprehensive checklist of questions you should be asking when touring a nursing home. Below are a few of the most important questions pertaining to the safety of your aging parent or loved one.
- Is the nursing home taking action to improve quality or staffing as needed?
- Does the nursing home’s inspection report show quality of care problems or other citations (failure to meet one or more state or federal requirements)?
- Has the nursing home corrected all citations on its last state inspection report?
- Does the relationship between staff and residents appear to be warm, polite, and respectful?
- Does the nursing home check to make sure they don’t hire staff members with a finding or history of abuse, neglect or mistreatment of residents in the state nurse aid registry?
- Does the nursing home have policies and procedures on prohibiting and reporting abuse and neglect?
- Is there information about how to report concerns about the care and safety of residents?
- Is there information about how the facility responds to concerns that are reported?
- Has the nursing home been cited for issues related to abuse in the last year or two?
Despite everyone’s best efforts to ensure quality care, sometimes best practices cannot protect against negligence. The unfortunate truth is, nursing home neglect or abuse can happen. While we hope you never find yourself in this position and asking the right questions up front will certainly help prevent it, we want to make sure you are supported in seeking action if it does.
No one deserves to be treated poorly, especially members of our older, more vulnerable population. Accountability is essential in helping prevent neglect and abuse.
If you believe that your loved one is suffering due to the abuse or negligence of a nursing home, it is important that you take immediate action. These facilities and care teams make an agreement to take proper care of your loved ones. If they fail to do so, you are entitled to recover for your damages.
To ensure that negligent nursing homes are held accountable, you need a nursing home abuse lawyer practicing in Hamilton, Ohio. The Richard’s Injury Firm has experience in handling these cases and we hope to play a role in preventing them from happening in the future.