Nursing Homes and Elder Abuse

Elder abuse in assisted living homes is a horrible thing, yet it still occurs today. Most recently, the Florida state government has responded to help eliminate this practice. Because of "rampant" abuse across the entire state, Florida's lawmakers have proposed two bills that will crack down on elder abuse. More specifically, if a patient dies because of poor care, these bills would enforce mandatory penalties that would cause the home to shut down. In other cases, individual caretakers would be banned from their profession.

Florida lawmakers claim that the state was not doing its job properly, as exposed by a series of articles written in the Miami Herald. Now, Florida is looking to go from one of the most lenient states regarding care all the way up to one of the strictest states in the U.S.

It's about time. Elder abuse is something that many people believe does not go on anymore, but it is still a rampant practice; the most common type of abuse being neglect. In Florida, a lot of the attention has been on the elderly folks who have died because of their mismanagement, but elder abuse takes on many different forms. These can range from missed medications to infected bed sores. Whatever the form that the neglectful abuse takes its shape in it is a practice that needs to be more closely monitored. If a home or a worker is found to be abusing patients, mandatory punishments, such as those proposed by Florida lawmakers, need to be enforced.

This marks the biggest overhaul of this type within Florida in over four decades. With the protection measures for assisted living facility patients slowly being stripped away over the last few decades, it is high time for a new mandatory set of regulations.

The proposed laws would take away a home's license if a patient dies from "shoddy" care. They would also avoid settlements in cases of neglectful deaths. The maximum penalty would automatically be imposed upon these offenders. The minimum qualifications of workers would also be increased. Instead of just having a high school diploma, a caretaker would be required to have a college diploma with at least some course work in health fields. There would also be severe criminal penalties for fraudulently altering assisted living facility paperwork regarding patient care.

Florida is finally taking steps in the right direction. The care that elders receive often is taken for granted, but as the case in Florida suggests, this should no longer be the case. Elder abuse needs to be looked out for and it needs to be reported to the authorities when it does happen. There is no excuse for shoddy care, our parents and grandparents deserve the best care possible.