Every Christmas I go to a nursing home with my kids and greet the elderly people there, singing carols with the choir and listening to their stories. I’ve been doing this for going almost two decades now and started when I was very young. Our church would visit the same nursing home every year to cheer up the residents, and seeing the joy that we brought them made a deep impact on me.
Things changed when my father had a stroke.
The man who had led us on our yearly trip to the nursing home was now suddenly incapacitated. Once he was back from the hospital, we all learned how to care for him. I moved back in to help my mother, who still had to work her full-time job. After six months, and with the aid of a medical alarm, he was able to be in the house by himself. After a year I left for graduate school, and he had deteriorated further. Since we couldn’t afford home care, we all agreed that a nursing home was the only choice left for us.
We made the move in June, the same month of his stroke, and promised that we’d come and see him often, and we did; the nursing home was less than a mile from the house. It wasn’t an easy decision, as you can imagine. Even the mention of nursing homes brings up unpleasant associations with recent examples of neglect and elder abuse. We researched the history and testimony of the location and I took a bit of initiative to familiarize myself with the laws that protect residents of nursing homes.
There are numerous laws protecting seniors from harm in general, which include:
- The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, a federal law prohibiting discrimination against workers over the age of 40 in any employment matter — hiring, working conditions, compensation, firing, promotions, duties and retaliation.
- The Older Americans Act of 1965, which created the federal Administration on Aging and authorized federal grants to the states for social services related to aging.
- Federal benefits programs, including Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Social Security and Medicare. Social Security and SSI protect people who are too old or unwell to work from poverty, while Medicare provides health care to seniors.
- State laws on elder abuse and neglect. All states have some sort of law that prohibits the physical, emotional or sexual abuse of older people, as well as neglect and financial exploitation. These laws can carry criminal penalties or open abusers to civil liability.
The laws about abuse and neglect are the important ones with regard to senior safety in nursing homes. Nursing home neglect reached epidemic highs in the 90s before the scandal was blown wide open, with hundreds of reported incidents a year. The following two graphs, taken from a report by the American Bar Association, tell the chilling tale:
