The decision to move a loved one to a nursing home is never easy. But there often comes a time when an elderly family member is no longer to take care of him or herself and there are no other family members to help.
When the decision is made, the family puts their trust into the hands of the nursing home facility and their staff to offer a reasonable standard of care to assure that the loved one lives out their days as happy and healthy as possible. It does not always go as planned though, as we recently learned at the Emerald South Nursing and Rehabilitation Center near Buffalo, New York.
The tragic story involves an 82 year old resident of the facility who wound up in the room of an 84 year old resident suffering from dementia. The incident that followed included the dementia resident beating to death the 82 year old. Following the incident, the nursing home also failed to properly report the incident in a timely manner, which was grounds for another citation from the State Department of Health. The dementia patient was supposed to be monitored every 15 minutes by the nursing home, which clearly did not happen in this instance.
Unfortunately, this facility has a bad history of injuries because of nursing home neglect. They have numerous violations of federal and state regulations, resulting in a one star rating for the location. Every patient in a nursing home deserves to live in an environment free of nursing home neglect and elder care abuse. But all too often, it is up to family members of victims to report the violations.
