If you know nothing about abuse in nursing homes, then all you can go by are the dramatic headlines where seniors were starved, beaten, robbed, etc. But that’s not how most cases go.
For the most part, abuse is much more subtle. It comes in the form of neglect and humiliation, which is exactly why so much of it never gets reported.
It doesn’t seem like that big of a deal when in reality, it DEFINITELY is.
Why It’s Hard to Notice Abuse in Nursing Homes
Most abuse is sneaky, so a lot of it stays hidden or ignored.
Here’s why:
Residents Might Be Afraid to Say Something
When you’re a resident in a nursing home, you depend on the staff for so much. Even if you’re generally healthy, it’s still the staff that serves you lunch, cleans up, makes sure you get your meds, and so on.
For those who are sick or bedridden, that dependency is even deeper.
So, what happens if you complain? Probably nothing good for you because there’s a chance the staff will retaliate. Actually, it’s more of a probability than a chance. If they do, it means your life will get even harder.
Dementia Makes Everything Harder
When it comes to residents with dementia or some other cognitive condition, reporting abuse is incredibly hard because they might not even recognize it. And if they do recognize it at that moment, it’s very likely that they’ll forget pretty much all of it or describe it in a very confusing way.
It’s easy to mistake signs of abuse for symptoms of dementia, which also means it’s easy to dismiss any allegations that something’s not quite right.
None of this means that abuse didn’t happen, but it does mean that the investigation becomes almost impossible.
Isolation Creates Blind Spots
40% of residents in nursing homes say that they’re lonely, which isn’t only a problem when it comes to mental health but also when it comes to safety.
If a person gets visitors all the time, then those visitors can notice changes in their behavior and health. But if those visits are few and far between, then the most concerning things go unnoticed. A bruise fades away, and nobody may even notice an item was stolen for a few weeks. A lot has changed in between those visits.
Isolation is one less safety net, and that’s something nobody can afford in a nursing home.
Not Every Type of Abuse Leaves a Mark
Bruises and broken bones get most of the attention, which makes sense because you can see them. But what about yelling, threatening, or humiliation? What about an elder who was left soiled for hours or who developed pressure sores because nobody turned them on time?
All of this is abuse, but because it happens slowly, it doesn’t carry as much drama as a broken bone or a cut.
But at the end of the day, the person on the other end of that abuse is still traumatized and hurt, even if all of their bones are intact and nobody’s ever hit them.
Why Some Cases Never Reach the Authorities
Let’s say you’ve noticed something, and you get worried. Nothing too dramatic, just a bruise that doesn’t make sense.
Now what? It’s obvious, isn’t it? You’ll report it so that it can be investigated.
But that’s not how it goes in the real world.
You can file a complaint, but there’s a high probability that it will never leave the nursing home. The facility will ‘handle it’ internally, which means that the same people who missed the issue are now in charge of making it right.
Hardly ideal.
To be fair, some nursing homes take complaints very seriously; they have actual procedures for them, and they stick to those procedures without exception. But there are also those who look at complaints as people being annoying, so they’ll apologize and stuff the complaint into a drawer somewhere.
And you have to remember that the employees themselves are under a tremendous amount of pressure.
Most of them aren’t bad people, but they’re exhausted and stressed.
Nursing homes are notorious for being understaffed and hard to work in, so cut them some slack. That doesn’t mean you should turn a blind eye to obvious abuse, but you shouldn’t be prejudiced just because you’re dealing with a nursing home.
The thing to remember is that each state has its own rules that protect people from abuse.
Here in Maryland, though, we don’t have specific laws, but we rely on broader negligence and elder abuse laws. But a nursing home abuse lawyer in New York would tell you that the state of New York has laws written specifically for nursing homes and residents’ rights.
Either way, options do exist; it’s only a matter of pursuing them.
Conclusion
Abuse can be really hard to spot in nursing homes, and even when you do, the road to accountability can be long and rocky.
With that being said, that doesn’t mean you should give up and hope for the best. On the contrary, if you smell a whiff of it, report it right away and ask for updates on the case.
If the nursing home doesn’t hand the report over to the authorities, nobody’s stopping you from going to them directly.
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