Untrained Staff Can Result in Nursing Home Abuse
Nursing home abuse cases often involve horrifying care with deadly outcomes. We hear it when we talk to the families we represent everyday. We all see it on the news now more than ever and wonder how a person can be driven to the point of inflicting that kind of abuse. Many of the incidents go unreported, often until the continual abuse leads to serious injuries, trauma, and even death. Among the many causes of nursing home abuse is undertrained staff.
Untrained and unqualified staffing can start as soon as in the hiring process. Some nursing homes do not do complete background and employment checks on nurses and aides. Be it to cut corners or simply because of being short on time and people to review a potential nursing home employee’s record, some nursing home facilities rush the hiring process. Once staff is hired many elder care facilities put them to work without training them on the facility’s policies, procedures and care rules, rules designed to provide proper care for the residents. Undertraining has gross effects on nursing home and elder care facility residents including:
Medication Errors
Medication errors are a leading cause of health complications and death in nursing homes nationwide. Be it from administering the wrong kind of medication to administering too much or too little, these are rookie errors that may result from poor training.
Poor Supervision
Undertraining goes hand in hand with understaffing. Hired workers often work upwards 12-hour shifts at a time with a wide variety of patients beneath them. This leads to simply neglecting certain patients just to get through the day. A recent case in Georgia involving three nurses with a massive workload were arrested for nursing home abuse for failing to check on a patient who was attacked by ants during an unsupervised 11-hour period. It’s a nightmarish situation that happens often.
Poor supervision can lead to residents suffering fall injuries, developing pressure ulcers (bedsores) and preventable infections – especially urinary tract infections which can lead to sepsis and death.
Undertraining is a problem that starts with the facility itself. It encourages a poor workplace in which loved ones are neglected and later abused out of frustration. The facility that is entrusted with caring for these patients quickly becomes the most dangerous place for them. Nobody should have to suffer the consequences of neglect and abuse due to the poor management and care of a facility.
If you or a loved one has been injured due to undertraining or negligence, please fill out our contact form or call Sugarman Law at 866-740-9185.
