CBC In Depth - Violence in Nursing Homes

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/nursing-homes/index.html

No one can say this has come as a surprise.


"What training there is, has been deemed in many circumstances to be inadequate because it still leaves low-paid personal support workers ill-prepared to deal with a nursing home population that is older, sicker and more mentally unstable than they were even 10 years ago."

Well, no shit, Sherlock. Offering the PSW course at Career College is an awesome way to get it more accessible to the public, but I have to wonder the specifics. Take for instance, my class. I love my whole class to pieces, they were all very amazing women for the most part. But... out of the eight of us, only two of us spoke very fluent English. Now, you mix a program that welfare is willing to pay for, the promise of a good job, a relatively easy course with fake credentials, and what do you get? You get an uneducated, egotistical little newbie.

Let me explain the "fake credentials" part. Graduates from TriOS and similar schools have to take this big test set by the National Association of Career Colleges. This is so obviously an advertising ploy, but to someone who wants a job, any promise of extra "college" credentials is like the fist morsel of food you've have in a month. No job posting I have seen has required that anyone pass the NACC, specifically. All you need is a PSW diploma and you're totally good to go. Now, I say egotistical because a lot of these girls, bless them, come out with 80% but still do not know their stuff. And it's scary. False confidence.

So you get these wide eyed wanderers out there in the nursing homes and do you think they remember ANYTHING they learned in school? No. The short staffed situations forced them to find short cuts that went against the book.

Do you think the elderly are well cared for? It's no fault of the staff at the nursing homes, not by an inch or a mile, but they are so understaffed it's not even funny. This leaves them with students and volunteers who have good intentions but are poorly trained.

This leads to outraged elderly people who do not understand why they can't get the time from the staff that they deserve. It's a terrible thing to bathe people as if they are on an assembly line, but it's the way it has to be for everything to work out with funding issues. The confused and outraged elderly are perceived by tired staff to be ungrateful for the care that they do get. Residents are violent towards each other because they are confused or they are in the wrong wing and are not getting the care that they need, either because no one has had the time to correctly assess them, or because there is no room in the wings they need to be in.

"Nursing homes in provinces such as Ontario have become so violent and dangerous for staff, that ministries of labour are targeting the homes for beefed-up inspections."

You can inspect these places until you are blue in the face, and make sure that their kitchens are up to code and that the residents' laundry is getting done as often as it should be. But until you address the underlying problems - the fact that PSWs are not trained well enough, are bullied by other staff, and that students and volunteers are being used in incorrect roles in our nursing homes - then you are not doing a damn thing to improve the lives of these residents. Pair this with the "minimums" that the nursing homes have to uphold, and a businessman behind the scenes pocketing thousands of dollars, and you are left with a system with more holes than anything else. I don't know if there's a whole lot the Ministry of Labour can do. It's not like all the staff at a nursing home can just walk off the front lines and leave hundreds of people in soiled briefs. But I don't really know if our Government understands that.

Hey, Dalton - wanna come do a gig with me? It starts at 6:30 am. Bring rubber gloves. (That's right, bring your own. The nursing home can't afford to provide them.) We'll start changing briefs and trying to get people dressed while we only have one lift for the whole floor. We'll probably get yelled at by some nurses on the way, just because we're us. We'll take the residents down for breakfast and I will feed and you can change beds, or visa-versa, whichever you'd prefer. Hope you don't hurt your back. There's no benefits. Oh, and you work for free. You're a student! See you bright and early! Ta!
No Love,
One of your extremely pissed off minions.