Choosing a nursing home for your elderly parent can be overwhelming. You don’t want your aging mother to have to live in a nursing home, but you can no longer take care of your mom. So, you conduct thorough research on nursing homes in our area to find one you can entrust your loving parent to.
When you pick out a Sarasota nursing home for your parent to reside in, you believe that the nursing staff will take care of your mom, feed her, change her, give her enough water, provide proper medication dosages, and make sure she is kept safe. Although it is hard to trust a perfect stranger with your mom’s well-being and health, the nursing home seems safe and responsible.
After your mother moves in, you decide to visit the home every Saturday. All appears to be fine on your weekend visits, so you are pleased with what you see. Then one week you are going to be out of town on the weekend and decide to drop in on a Tuesday night instead. You don’t like what you see. It appears that your mother has not been fed or changed, and there is no water for her to drink. You start wondering if anyone has checked on your mother all day or even administered her medication.
You start looking for a staff member and can’t find anyone. You realize that the nursing home is way understaffed and become concerned for your mother’s health and safety.
The Reality of an Understaffed Nursing Home
You are perfectly right to be concerned for your mother’s quality of life at an understaffed nursing home. When a nursing home runs lean, it puts its residents at risk. Many nursing homes are guilty of this—providing a full staff during the weekends when they know there will be more visitors and then cutting back on staff during the week to save money.
An understaffed nursing home can be committing nursing home abuse in Sarasota by participating in the following:
- Neglect. Understaffed nursing homes do not have enough staff to provide clean clothing and bedding or change their patients. Additionally, they may not be able to respond to a patient’s injury, causing a patient to suffer more than he or she should.
- Malnutrition. Nursing homes that are understaffed often do not provide quality food to their patients or make sure patients are eating the food they are given.
- Dehydration. When a nursing home does not have enough workers to provide water to patients, patients may become dehydrated.
If you find that your loved one’s nursing home is understaffed, the home may be committing nursing home abuse if it is neglecting its patients’ needs. Neglect is a type of nursing home abuse in Florida that is cruel.
Find out more about nursing home abuse and how to protect your loved one by ordering The Florida Nursing Home Abuse Handbook: Ways to Recognize & Prevent Abuse and Neglect, written by Sarasota elder abuse attorneys at Mallard Perez, and call today for legal advice at (888) 409-3805.
