Matt Lee
Bengal Submission
A few months ago, I was having a discussion with a nurse friend of mine. I am by no means a medical professional, but I do work in the hospital kitchen. So, I’ve taken a particular interest in the medical field.
In this particular discussion, she told me about her experience working in a nursing home as a Certified Nursing Assistan (CNA) before she’d become a nurse. It was a brutal experience, where many long nights were spent taking care of way too many patients.
The stories she told were insane, and I was absolutely intrigued. These stories are what led me down the rabbit hole of researching understaffing in nursing homes, and what I found was shocking, to say the least. So shocking that I wrote a speech about it for my Comm 1101 class.
But I didn’t want to just stop by ranting to a captive audience of 25 freshmen. I want to continue talking about this issue with many other people in order to raise awareness and hopefully inspire someone to create a better future for nursing homes.
One of the most startling statistics that I found claimed that a staggering 70% of nursing homes in the United States are run for-profit. That means that while providing care for the elderly folks we entrust to them should be their top priority, their main focus ends up being how much profit can be gained from their “business.” No wonder nursing homes get a bad rap!
In the small state of Idaho alone, there are seventy-eight nursing homes in our forty-four counties. And we are on the lower end.
California has over 1,200 homes, and with such an oversaturated market, one can’t help but wonder how there is any possibility of quality control. What I found in my research is that there isn’t.
Apparently, nursing homes aren’t audited regularly. Auditors only ever visit homes if a serious violation is reported. Often times, though, auditors will not actually cite violations, or will tend to minimize them. This ensures that nursing homes with crappy healthcare can continue to operate.
The people who regularly abuse and neglect the patients, we are told, are the nursing staff. This is one of the biggest half-truths told in the medical field today.
While abuse happens, and neglect happens much more often, the nurses behind these infractions are not all horrible, neglectful people.
One of the most unbelievable stories that I read in my research tells of a nurse who worked an entire home by herself. That means the staffing ratio for that day was one nurse for every sixty patients. It is simply impossible for a single person to take care of that many people, some with advanced needs.
Even if only half of those patients had a very simple request, a nurse would simply be unable to keep up with all of the pressure.
Medical professionals suggest that nursing homes are understaffed intentionally, in order to save the facility money, and to be entirely honest, that wouldn’t surprise me. There is a proven correlation between high-profit margins and low quality of care in these facilities.
The fact that staffing is inadequate creates a lot of pressure on nurses. So much, in fact, that the estimated turnover rates of nursing staff in nursing homes is nearly 100%.
While nurses and CNAs are under such pressure to meet such a high volume of demands, they cannot be expected to provide quality care. It’s a sad truth, but it is the reality.
It is a very common occurrence for a nurse to provide a resident with drugs which haven’t been approved for that patient, in order to satisfy the patient in the few seconds that they may be able to spend with them.
One nurse even left a man with his femur protruding through his skin to suffer because he thought that the man would heal on his own. That may sound ridiculous, and indeed, it is a pretty extreme example, but how can nurses be expected to always make the right calls for their patients without adequate time to spend on them?
Perhaps nursing home managers should be stigmatized rather than the nurses who have their hands tied.
I was surprised when I learned the truth about nursing homes, because it is clearly such a huge problem that more people should be talking about, but I realized that perhaps we aren’t talking about it because most of us aren’t aware that there is a problem.
It is my hope that someone reading this will eventually be able to create real change in nursing homes, so that no patient will ever have to sit alone for hours in pain. Let’s hold the people who care for our elderly accountable to provide the best possible care that they can.
