The assisted-living facility in Edina, Minnesota, where Jean H. Peters and her siblings moved their mother in 2011, looked lovely. “But then you start uncovering things,” Peters said.
Her mother, Jackie Hourigan, widowed and developing memory problems at 82, too often was still in bed when her children came to see her in midmorning.
“She wasn’t being toileted, so her pants would be soaked,” said Peters, 69, a retired nurse-practitioner in Bloomington, Minnesota. “They didn’t give her water. They didn’t get her up for meals.” She dwindled to 94 pounds.
Most ominously, Peters said, “we noticed bruises on her arm that we couldn’t account for.” Complaints to administrators — in person, by phone and by email — brought “tons of excuses.”
So Peters bought an inexpensive camera at Best Buy. She and her sisters installed it atop the refrigerator in her mother’s apartment, worrying that the facility might evict her if the staff noticed it.
Monitoring from an app on their phones, the family saw Hourigan going hours without being changed. They saw and heard an aide loudly berating her and handling her roughly as she helped her dress.
They watched as another aide awakened her for breakfast and left the room even though Hourigan was unable to open the heavy apartment door and go to the dining room. “It was traumatic to learn that we were right,” Peters said.
In 2016, after filing a police report and a lawsuit, and after her mother’s death, Peters helped found Elder Voice Advocates, which lobbied for a state law permitting cameras in residents’ rooms in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities. Minnesota passed it in 2019.
Good. These nursing homes need some serious accountability.
They’re straight up prisons. I visit them frequently as an advocate, and here’s my advice:
if you can manage it, don’t send your family to them. Skip Assisted Living and only break down at skilled nursing care when it’s medically too much to handle.
I mean that’s tough. Unless you have an unemployed family member who can take on the care, and even then it has to be a physically strong and frankly mentally strong person to do the kind of care elderly folks require. It’s just not feasible for most families.
My grandmother is physically disabled and has dimentia. Some weeks are hell taking care of her, and she’s one of the gentlest people with dimentia I have ever met. ( I used to work in a memory care facility, which is a big reason she’s at home with us)
Of course! I want to stress the if you can clause. If you can’t do it, it’s understandable - it’s one of, if not the hardest job there is.
They’re practically living coffins. I’d rather die than ever live in one.
It’s only going to get worse. I’m truly hoping personal robots will be available in 20 years.