Millions of elderly and disabled Americans live in nursing, assisted living and other care facilities.
While patients and their families admit patients to these facility rightly expect these care providers to appropriately and safely care for their patients, unfortunately and too many instances the care that their family member receives not only is disappointing, but actually harmful.
And alarmingly long list of negligence and other liability judgments as well as oversight and enforcement work by the Department of Health and Human Services, States’ department of aging, watchdog agencies, nursing home litigators reveal commonly recurring problems account for many of these tragedies Problems range from overmedicating residents, or patient abuse or neglect.
Patients and their families need to recognize the need to carefully select and oversee the care of their family member in these facilities Many resources are available to help educate family members and friends search as this YouTube video about nursing home abuse recently shared by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Careful investigation and credentialing at the facilities your love will stay in before and during their stay is an important part of the process. No matter how good the facility looks in this credentialing, families and caregivers and patient must keep in mind that even the best facilities can experience problems of neglect, unawareness, miscommunication, miss perception and even abuse. For this reason, families should keep in mind that frequent visits from family members and other visitors familiar with and loyal to the patient at different times can make a huge difference in helping the patient to get the best care possible, identifying potential issues services or quality and detecting more quickly service disruptions or deficiencies, changes in their family members conditions that need attention, signs of abuse or neglect and other concerns.
To learn more about what you and your family can do to be more effective participants in your healthcare and help improve health care for others, follow, share input and resources and get involved in our Project COPE initiative by following and sharing our updates in this ProjectCOPE.blog, on Facebook @ProjectCOPECOALITION or on LinkedIn.
Call To Action: Become a Project COPE Healthcare Hero
Despite an endless stream of well-meaning market and governmental reforms over the past 25 years, the U.S. health care system is in crisis. American patients, their families and other caregivers, their employers, their health benefit programs, their health care providers, the communities and even our federal health care budget increasingly are burdened and overwhelmed by the mounting obstacles to caring for our ill, disabled, and aging citizens within our health care system and the extraordinary expense of maintaining and using that system.
As Congress takes up reform again, it is critical that Americans act to protect their own and their families’ health care and control the financial burdens of health care by getting informed, providing clear and consistent direction to Congress and other reformers and taking other actions to empower and care for themselves and their loved ones within our evolving health care system.
©2017 Cynthia Marcotte Stamer. Non-exclusive right to republish licensed to Solutions Law Press, Inc. For information about republication of this or other materials and programs of the author, email the author here. All rights reserved.
PROJECT COPE: COALITION ON PATIENT EMPOWERMENT 