RANDOM NOTES by Scott Morgan
It hurts me to see my wife in any kind of pain, but she is afflicted with chronically giving a damn and pain is one of the major side effects of empathy.
Last week, she came home ready to unhinge. She delivers flowers for a living, cheerful bundles of I’ve-been-thinking-of-you to people who often need someone to care about them. The night she came home teetering on a crying jag, she had dropped off flowers for her landlord, a tiny, elderly woman who had just entered a nursing home in Princeton because she’d fallen and broken her hip.
Without getting into specifics, this woman apparently was manhandled by one of the nurses at this home. She’s also been witness to a fellow hip patient being taken to the bathroom by the same nurse with what my wife, Connie, described to me as "actual physical aggression."
The woman’s daughter, upon learning of things like this, cried. She wanted to say something; her mother asked that no one make a fuss because it would only make things worse on her if someone started trouble.
The landlady was soon moved to the first floor, away from this nurse, but this is only one minor success for a woman who will be home as soon as her hip is good enough to walk on. There are still a lot of people on the other floors, and even if the problem is only with this one nurse, this nurse will still be involved in patient therapy for as long as she works there.
It is this image that haunts my wife. The one of people without daughters who are there to cry and move them to another floor, left to hope the problem goes away because they just don’t have it in them to physically defend themselves.
Connie asked me for my help that night. My heart broke when I told her I had nothing for her. She wants to do something, but she doesn’t know what. Cruelty sits very badly with the both of us, but the reality is that without a specific, documented case, accusing any business of wrongdoing is bad business.
And so she is in pain, wanting to alert the world that the golden years don’t always have a silver lining and agonized by the fact that there is little to do but point people toward knowledge.
The best thing I can do for her, and for anyone who is (or should be) concerned over the abuses withstood by the helpless and the old is to put words on a page several thousand people can see. I am not smart enough to find a way around nursing home abuse, so what I can do is alert people to what they should know before putting someone inside one of these places.
The U.S. Nursing Home Registry (www.memberofthefamily.net) breaks down nursing homes across the country through a color-coded/alphabetical system. A facility flagged red, or example, is known to have had an incident of actual harm or is a place in which patients are in immediate jeopardy. The higher the letter, which could go as far as L, the more dangerous the place is. You can check out the registry at the above Web address to get an idea of exactly what kind of facility you are about to place a family member into. Or, perhaps, a better picture of the facility someone already is in.
The state Department of Health and Senior Services offers a report card on every long-term care facility in New Jersey. The HSS Web site offers a color map which breaks down facilities by county, plus an electronic sheet by which you can enter a facility name and review its report card. The school-like grading system, based on 100, shows the grades HSS has given facilities.
It’s automatically sobering and disgusting to see how some facilities rate. While some score 90-plus, which, according to HSS criteria, is pretty good, others score in the 70s and 80s and one Mercer County home even scores in the 60s.
For the record, the facility treating Connie’s landlady did pretty well on the state report cards and was flagged as a facility which has the "potential for more than minimal harm."
Visit the HSS report cards page at www.state.nj.us/health/ltc/cgi/reportcard.htm. Or give the folks at HSS a call at (609) 292-7837. They’re very helpful.
And, as common sense dictates, always check things out for yourself. Talk to residents and members of families who have a relative in a long-term care facility. Use report cards and registries as a guide, but do your homework. Just because abuse hasn’t been reported, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
Some people are afraid attention will just make things worse for them, remember?