Bad Trends in Assisted Living Care for the Elderly

The trend in assisted living facilities being the primary way we take care of our aging loved ones is continuing to increase. With this increasing trend are some other not so nice aspects to this burgeoning elder care business. Care worker to resident ratios based on state licensing requirements are often ignored. The staff that takes care of your loved one in the day and night are usually paid near minimum wage. Managers get bonuses based on cutting the budget which often encourages working the facility understaffed.

One of the easiest ways to discover if the elder care facility you are considering has a bad elder care environment is to visit the facility at night. Usually a badly run assisted living facility may only have 1 or 2 care workers on staff at night in a Type B facility. They could be running a shell staff like this although have as many as 60 - 80 residents at the facility. Many of the residents will soil their clothes at night and need round the clock care but with only 2 care workers for over 60 residents many care workers simply give up and let the day care workers handle this mess.

Another way to determine just how well the care workers take care of the residents is to meet and greet not the upper management but the actual care workers. Talk to the care workers in private away from the management. These jobs have a very high turn over. The likelihood that the care worker will answer honestly probing questions is very good. You will gain some really good insightful knowledge about the facility and it will probably be closer to the truth than what the manager might tell you.

When walking through and doing a tour of the elder care facility take time to look at the care workers in the eyes. If the care workers refuse to look at you in the eye they may very well have something to hide. If you see friendly smiles from the grunt level staff it may just be that they are happy because they do in fact have enough staff on hand to care for all the residents and are generally happy because of a rewarding job caring for the elderly. You see an assisted living care worker job can be highly rewarding but it often is not do to the ignored care worker to resident ratio requirements by law.

A new trend in assisted living facilities is to keep residents at Type A facilities longer than they should be. Once someone begins to come down with memory diseases like Alzheimer's and dementia they should be moved to a Type B facility. Some facilities get around this requirement by hiring services to come in and offer a medicine reminder service. A person will come in and give the resident their medicine at specified intervals during the day for a fee so they do not overdose or forget to take their medicine. If the resident is in the beginning stages of a memory disease this medicine reminder service can post pone the need to move to a Type B facility. The only problem with this work around is that someone with a memory disease could walk out of a Type A facility and become lost on the street and even run over.

In summary it is worth considering some of the bad trends effecting the elder care facility industry. Care worker to resident ratio violations is one of the most common and worst violations. Leaving residents too long at a Type A facility usually does not result in too many accidents although accidents do happen from this from time to time. And finally lack of criminal background checks on care worker staff with the combination of low pay and not enough workers results in mental and physical violence to innocent elderly residents at these assisted living facilities.