Saturday, November 30, 2013

Nursing Homes: Elder Abuse On The Rise - One Way To Protect Your Parents


This will not come as a surprise to anybody but baby boomers are reaching retirement age so rapidly that supporting social programs cannot possibly keep up. A baby boomer reaches age 65 every 10 seconds. Seniors over the age of 65 will soon be a bigger proportion of the population than those under 65. That's a scary statistic!

This also places stress on nursing homes and long-term care facilities with a double whammy. Not only is there a shortage of beds for the patients but there's also a shortage of qualified staff to care for them. These shortages lead to all kinds of shortcuts and abuses. The home healthcare industry is booming as a result of those shortages. They don't have enough people either so there are shortcuts in the hiring process there also.

Elder abuse can be manifested in many ways-from the withholding of necessary medications to verbal and physical abuse. Even psychological abuse is present. A study not long ago showed that 60% of all nursing homes had some kind of elder abuse and that 90% of all healthcare facilities employed a convicted felon-some even more than one.

And that kind of abuse happens in regulated industries of nursing homes. Can you imagine what goes on in home healthcare?

Alzheimer patients or dementia patients may be unable to verbalize what is going on in either their care facility or at home. That leads people to believe that they can get away with just about anything. That's why some states have legalized the use of hidden cameras and spy cameras in long-term care facilities and nursing homes. Texas was the first. That way the adult children of patients can keep an eye on what's going on. And to be honest, it's about the only way that elder abuse can be caught.

Hidden cameras or spy cameras are hidden inside objects that are very common and will fit into just about any setting so no one would suspect they are being recorded. As you can see Covert Spy Cameras can look like just about anything you can imagine. The most effective ones have DVR's built right in and use an SD card to record color images for easy recording and playback.

Almost all of the hidden cameras and spy cameras feature motion activated recording to eliminate dead recording time. This allows you to get longer effective recording times.

A hidden camera or spy camera is one way, maybe the only way, to protect your parents from elder abuse.

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