Thank your for reporting your experience in our tragic elder care facilities.
When I was a young child, my Great-Grandma Mary had a stroke and spent her last three years in private facility back in the 1970s. I was always in tow with my Gran wherever she went when I was spending summers and holidays with her. If my Gran hadn't been sure to be there to feed Grandma Mary at breakfast and dinner, she'd likely have wasted away much sooner, as we saw some residents suffer. One of her roomates – whom no one ever visited – was so neglected in that facility that she developed a near deadly infection in her hip from bedsores, which my grandmother discovered when she tried to make the lady comfortable.
Later, from 1998 into 2008, my Gran languished in nursing homes with senile dementia. The first facility was little better than the one my great-gran was in. I have to say though, the second facility and it's Alzheimer and dementia wing was worlds away from that other facility. Again, my grandfather was certain to be there every morning and evening for seven years. When he could no longer do that as his health declined, my mother and myself and sisters made sure someone was there every single day. And, in our frequent visits, we saw nothing of the horrors I witnessed in my great-gran's nursing home.
My son, as a young boy and then a tween, volunteered for visits with residents in a three different nursing homes. One was a state facility. It was the worst I've seen; cramped, crowded, understaffed, with an oppressive atmosphere and replete with the moans and pleading for attention of patients everywhere strapped in and left neglected in wheelchairs parked in hallways, or in beds crying out for attention; and over all this the constant call alarms never silenced. I saw three staffers on the floor, a harried desk nurse, and an administrator's desk piled so high the woman at the desk was obsured from view. The understaffing and the neglect was apparentwas obvious in all these facilities; but nowhere as severe as that state run facility.
I don't know what the answer may be. But, home carers are as crushed by the experience as you decribe. Only one of my sisters was there for my parents. One sister had already passed away and I am sick and disabled myself. We won't go into my other sister's – the most delicacy I can give this is here – issues. Anway, my mother died in 2018 and my father just passed in December – both at home in my sister's care. She was in a constant state of being overwhelmed and crushed. Little support was accessible until the very end when each of my parents were able to have hospice nurses assigned to assist with home care.
We just do not do right by our people in elder care nor the carers who give over their lives to that care.
