Of course I’m looking for the angle here. Everyone knows it’s  better for baby and mom to breast feed for the first year. Some women are just not able, comfortable, or stable enough to do some. Throwing in their faces that now in addition to being bad mothers they will be punished further by getting diabetes because they didn’t breastfeed their babies.

What does breastfeeding have to do with diabetes? I has to do with burning excess fat from your body. If I’m righ about that then how about singling out those people who don’t exercise. or those who don’t run, walk, or jog?

Maybe we could group a lot of different people together like those who golf and aren’t burning enough calories?

You know as well as I do that mothers are easy to attack and are sponges for guilt trips.

Your life style is what counts, what you are doing now in terms of diet and movement, leave the breasts out of it and do what’s best for you and your child.

This abuse occured at night at the Kane Regional Center’s Glen Hazel facility. Another employee finally reported it after six months. The abuse occured during overnight shifts.

This is probably the reason it went on for so long. There are no visitors during overnight shifts so the accused would know that it would have to be someone on the inside.

The cowards names are  Mary Ann Bower, 57, Danielle Taylor, 46, of Pittsburgh; Shelly Keene, 35, of West Mifflin; Karen Perry, 46, of Homestead; and Shalaya Hatten, 30.

There were no other reports of abuse by any other residents or staff, so authorities can’t figure out why this one woman was singled out.

Well how about this for an explaination, there was other abuse but no need to report it since these idiots are already being fired and charged.

You must understand that no matter how you say you will protect them, you can’t. These helpless residents are there by themselves at night, at the mercy of the staff, and they are afraid. They can hear them come into their rooms at night and steal from them, but they know the best thing for them to do is to pretend they are asleep and live with it.

I would urge administrations of nursing homes to occasionally have departments heads come in for surprise checks during overnight hours to at least slow down the neglect and abuse. Many staffers spend the night hours sleeping themselves and only care for the residents right before staff changes in the morning, and the only way to catch this is to bust in during the night and check the residents.

Nursing home owners see this system as not fair and incomplete. From one to five stars, five being the highest, the home is rated on 10 “quality of care measures”.

Once again the government has way over complicated something which should be pretty simple. For instance they are mainly using state surveys over a three years period. However the state surveys are only about two weeks long in which the nursing home is aware they are being watched and rated. Out of the three years, more weight is given for the last years surveys than the previous two years.

Another couple of flaws would be that they are taking the total number of nursing homes and dividing them into percentages so that the top 10% only will recieve a five star rating. So even if all the homes are terrible the top 10% will get a high score. The other main flaw is that we are talking about nursing homes. Most of the residents are elderly and in ill health. The state and the feds will fault the homes where the residents health and mobility are not getting better, duh! It is possible for some residents to improve, however a lot of their ideas here are very unrealistic.

Some of the nursing homes insist that only a visit will tell the complete story and they are correct.

The main thing is that this whole concept is not new. The states and even the feds have been giving different monies for certain extra services provided and taken away for those standards they set which were not met.

Homes that accept medicare and medicaid are surveyed every 12 to 15 months and have shown these results.

They are not surprising however. Non for profit homes are usually the best choice because they do what they do for the residents and no other reason.  For profit homes are businesses and skimp on as much as possible to increase their profits. The most crucial thing they skimp on is staff. By skimping on the number of Cna’s to residents they save themselves money but cut down on care. By skimping on the Cna’s salary they are skimpimg on quality of Cna’s. That has a lot to do with some of the care violations these homes are getting.

The states themselves set the standards at a minimum amount of staff to residents, and that’s what the for profit homes follow. If the states lowered the amount of residents per Cna they would all get better care.

The truth is that every doctors office I have ever gone to uses nurses for assistants. People that take these classes upon graduation find themselves at least ten thousand dollars in debt to the school and the only jobs that they are offered or can get are Certified Nurses Assistants, or CNA’s. To further dash the hope of a great career, most hospitals I know do not hire CNA’s, A few years ago many of them even stopped hiring Licensed Practical Nurses or LPN’s, and only want Registered Nurses or RN’s.

This only leaves one place that I know of that hires CNA’s and those are nursing homes. I don’t want to make it sound like CNA’s are worthless. They are not. I have worked with the most helpful, wonderful, and caring CNA’s ever. I believe the difference between the good ones and the bad ones is that the better ones knew what they would be doing on the job after graduation. The bad ones believed the commercials and are somewhat bitter about wasting all that time and money so they could end up making minimum wage for the dirtiest and most thankless job around.

Nursing homes themselves are partly to blame because in the owners desperation to earn the almighty dollar they not only pay very low, but they will only schedule whatever the minimum ratio of aides to residents are. In my state it’s one aide to every ten or eleven residents.

On a skilled care floor or unit, you have all the residents that cannot do even the simple daily tasks, like going to the bathroom, dressing, showering, or feeding. The aide is put under a lot of pressure to sometimes clean urine and feces from the resident and the bedding, then to shower and dress the resident and assist in feeding, helping them transfer from bed to chair to toilet and back to chair and bed. Multiply all that by ten or eleven. Now imagine that those resident needs are ongoing and just because you have finished one does not mean they no longer need you just because you’re doing that all over again with another resident.

The point is simple.

• You’ve got to love caring for the elderly and the dying.
• You need to know before enrolling in a school what your real job options will be.
• Nursing homes that are owned by individuals must pay more and add additional staff where needed.
• Those that find themselves stuck in a job that they hate must either find a new job, or go back to school, a real school to better their situations.