6 Responses

1. BigSea
   November 30th, 2007 at 12:05 pm

   It’s too bad the home itself takes the blame when it’s the parent corporation’s fault. I know a manager at this home and she works 80 hour weeks with no help trying to make sure the entire home and all of their patients are in compliance with state and federal regulations.

   Their parent company gives them tiny budgets to and no staff: Mr. Bradford and other administrators (including my sister-in-law) put in ungodly hours for very little pay to care for our elderly - a task we as a country have cast off our own shoulders.

   Our medical system is a for-profit institution, so we can only expect that they’ll do the very least to make the very most. As for this home in particular, Apollo, they do the most they can with what they’ve got for resources - which is very little.

   Point is: blame their parent company, not the home itself. I know firsthand how hard the employees work to care for their patients. It’s not their fault that they don’t have the staff or resources they need to do the job.

2. brightlight
   November 30th, 2007 at 1:36 pm

   You’re right. No one is to blame for anything, ever - especially not people you know personally.

   I once got a lukewarm Dixie cup of lemonade from my enterprising eight-year-old neighbor. When I asked him why it was lukewarm, he told me it was because he was understaffed and underfunded. In fact, I would be wearing clean underwear today if it weren’t for the fact that I am presently understaffed and underfunded.

   The point is that the whole world is apparently understaffed and underfunded, yet a large number of facilities somehow miraculously managed to keep themselves off this list. I don’t think anyone is trying to lay blame squarely on any particular person or component of the facility. Then again, to insinuate that everyone who works there is a hapless martyr is probably a bit of a stretch. It’s an institutional assessment, so let’s just go with the sister-in-law neutral notion that the suck is distributed institutionally.

3. cobrawinfrey
   November 30th, 2007 at 3:37 pm

   Keep in mind the nursing industry is, as stated, a for-profit industry. Facilities like Apollo, however, are consitantly dealing with residents/families that are not able to foot the bill, many offered free sanctuary until discharge plans are finalized and most coasting on Medicare/Medicaid payments- essentially the overall financial intake of the facility is nowhere near as profitable as, say, a private practice physician. If you want your parents to be socially, physically, and mentally attended to with the dignity they deserve, you’d better find yourself a facility that treats their employees with the same degree of dignity; in crude terms, envision this:

   Your enterprising eighty-year-old resident gives you a lukewarm pile of soft feces to clean up on a regular basis, must be fed by hand three to five times a day, routinely spits pills in your face while you attempt to administer his or her medication, has an overbearing family who think that their mom/dad’s haircut was a little too short, requires a hernia-invoking lift to move from bed to wheelchair to toilet, and cannot be “restrained” in one’s wheelchair (per state regulations) despite frequent falls from said chair (resulting in a nasty recurring bruise that his/her family is thrilled about). Your daily care includes 10 similar individuals, and you make 8 bucks on the hour and haven’t heard the words “thank you” in three months despite your best efforts.

   What is the quality of your work? Do you have time to give a shit about those bedsores? Or does that haircut need immediate fixing before the family calls the state ombudsmen?

   And I call bullshit on your eight-year-old neighbor’s claim about being understaffed and underfunded. He’s nowhere near that economically literate, and the temperature of the lemonade was no doubt the result of the fresh piss he mixed it with.

4. Casey
   November 30th, 2007 at 5:11 pm

   Hmm. Yeah. Uh. Let’s check the facts here:

   1. Failure to provide proper care to residents with feeding tubes
   2. Failure to manage resident funds
   3. Failure to review the drug regimen of each resident on a monthly basis
   4. Physically restraining residents for “discipline or convenience”
   5. Failure to provide adequate housekeeping
   6. Staff members failed to report changes in a dying resident’s condition to her doctor and to provide her with cardiopulmonary resuscitation

   I don’t think that’s a parent company thing. I could maybe see #2 and maybe #5 being related to parent company funding, but restraining residents? That is squarely on the shoulders of the people working there.

   You know someone who is there doing good work, and that is awesome. That is how things change, from the inside. So more power to them, but let’s call this what it is: a nursing home that is on the top of the list of the worst nursing homes in the country.

5. brightlight
   November 30th, 2007 at 5:36 pm

   Well, I might have to side with the Cobra regarding the whole “restraint” issue. If you’re not allowed to strap someone in who falls a lot, that’s kind of bullshit.

   But anyhoo . . .

   I think most people would agree with you that the provision of long-term care to the elderly is probably one of the more difficult and thankless jobs around. Unfortunately, it also seems to fall in that class of jobs where you’re not really allowed to match your level of effort to the level of compensation you receive. This is why people like health care workers and teachers get to be socially regarded as saints by the rest of us. When human beings are on the other end of the services, things get complicated.

   I guess I’m not getting your point. Obviously there are problems at this place - managerial issues that affect the quality of the work. You yourself suggest this. How does this get resolved? It seems to me like it gets resolved by someone noticing the suck, hopefully finding its true source (ostensibly the management), and fixing it. My only point involved pushing back on the notion that apparently everybody in there is a victim of some horrible government conspiracy to maintain impossible standards of care.

   Also, if you have to “call bullshit” on an analogy that was clearly bullshit to begin with then you fail at the internetz. Please reference lemonade analogy 1.3.4.5a

6. RAIN
   October 27th, 2008 at 7:54 am

   YES I THINK THAT IS REALLY A DOG ON SHAME HOW THIS FACILITY IS MAKING THE BURG LOOK JUST THAT DAMN BAD… I MEAN REALLY IF THE STATE CAN’T DO ANYTHING OR WON’T DO ANYTHING THEN THEY REALLY NEED TO FIND SOMEONE THAT WILL, BECAUSE GOD KNOWS IF ONE OF MY FAMILY MEMBERS HAVE TO BE PUT IN A NURSING HOME,AND MISS TREATED THEN I KNOW I WILL HAVE MY LAWYER ON THEIR ASSES LIKE WHITE ON RICE. AND THAT’S A TRUE FACT… TH WHOLE SITUATION IS REALLY PISSING ME OFF RIGHT NOW SO I GOTTA GO BEFORE I SAY SOME REALLY UNLAWFUL WORDS… BUT REALLY THE STATE NEEDS TO GET IT TOGETHER BEFORE IT’S TOO DAMN LATE FOR ALL THESE NURSING HOMES IN FLORIDA PERIOD