Nursing Home Staff to Get Background Checks
Kentucky’s nursing homes are among the worst in the country. A recent study ranked Kentucky on the bottom rung of states, with over 40% of Kentucky’s nursing homes receiving only one or two stars on the CDC’s five-star care system. The poor care for seniors in Kentucky’s nursing homes has resulted in:
• A scabies outbreak in Nicholasville,
• Staff torturing a resident in Western Kentucky with hot peppers shoved in her mouth,
• A Bardstown man left unassisted after a fall resulting in a spinal injury and his death, and
• An entire facility in East Louisville shut down for squalid conditions, including residents waking up covered in ants.
These incidents, and many more, led to an average of over 6,000 reports of abuse on Kentucky’s nursing home facilities every year, and have been a black mark on Kentucky and how it treats its seniors.
In an effort to help address these terrible statistics, the state Cabinet for Health and Family Services recently passed a regulation requiring facilities making new hires to run national background checks through the FBI’s fingerprint database. This is in addition to a state-run background check system which does not include violations from other states which may preclude a person from caring for elder patients.
While this is a small step in ensuring better patient care and staffing, it and other efforts face stiff resistance from nursing home corporations which claim they are regulated too much. These corporations testified before the state legislature that regulatory burdens were “excessive” and that there is a “regulatory crisis” in Kentucky. However, given the terrible incidences of nursing home abuse in Kentucky—and the fact Kentucky’s nursing homes raked in over $1 billion in revenue from Medicaid alone—it appears the only ones suffering from a nursing home “crisis” in Kentucky are residents and not corporations.
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The Poppe Law Firm® represents people all over the states of Kentucky and Indiana who suffer from nursing home abuse or neglect, including pressure sores, falls, physical abuse, and lack of treatment. If you or a loved one has been the victim of nursing home abuse or neglect, please contact us at (502) 895-3400.
Be sure to check out our website for more links on how to protect loved ones you think may be victims of nursing home abuse and neglect by visiting http://www.poppelawfirm.com/nursing-home-neglect.html