At a minimum, when a loved one is admitted to a nursing home, you would hope that he or she enters a safe, reputable and responsible facility. While there are many good facilities across the country, there also seems to be trouble brewing below the surface, trouble that often evades public attention.  

There are national assessments available of nursing home care across the states and there are a range of resources available to help you consider and evaluate a particular nursing home for a loved one. More specifically, the Nursing Home Compare Website provides detailed information about every Medicare and Medicaid-certified nursing home in the country. And beginning this month, this website will now post special alerts for all nursing homes that have been cited for the abuse, neglect or exploitation of patients. 

But there are many worrisome trends beneath the surface involving unsafe and risky nursing home care practices. First, there have been policy proposals to ease federal regulations governing nursing homes, including proposals to relax the regulations on the administration of antipsychotic medications in facilities and to downgrade the qualifications required of food and nutrition service directors in nursing homes. This last proposal is significant in that a recent expose in Salon detailed horrifying safety violations in nursing home kitchens that have put thousands of frail and immune-compromised residents at risk. That report comes on the heels of another expose in The New York Times detailing the virulent spread of a drug-resistant fatal fungus that’s rampant in nursing homes across the country.

Because financial incentives have encouraged the discharge of sick patients from hospitals to less expensive long term care facilities, there has been a growing crisis in nursing homes, which lack the resources, staff, and training to adequately care for these seriously ill patients alongside long term residents who also reside in these facilities. As an example, The Atlanta Constitution newspaper recently ran a multi-part series calling attention to the dismal care and quality of many facilities in Georgia. But Georgia is not alone: across the country, there is a brewing storm. With a growing senior population, insufficient funding and training at facilities and few policy proposals to help guide planning for this ever-growing problem, many of us- either for ourselves or loved ones- could be affected by this coming catastrophe.