Blumenthal Hearing On Health Issues For Elderly Includes His Brother

Caring for the elderly in hospitals, group homes and nursing homes is fraught with problems from over medicating patients, to people falling and injuring themselves when they're not supervised.

A lack of coordinated medical treatment for patients, over-medicating elderly people to subdue behavior related to dementia and all manner of other problems recur in places that care for elderly people, according to advocates and clinicians.

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., held a Senate Special Committee on Aging hearing Monday at a legislative office Monday in Hartford. The point of the hearing was to bring attention to some of those problems and to examine possible remedies.

"Preventable adverse events contributed to the deaths of as many as 950 Medicare beneficiaries last year in Connecticut alone," Jean Rexford, founder of Connecticut Center for Patient Safety, said in her testimony before Blumenthal.

And that was just in hospitals, she said. "This statistic does not include preventable deaths in our nursing homes or private homes, nor does it include the non-Medicare population," Rexford said. "Another 22,000 patients acquired infections while they were treated in health care facilities and almost all of those were preventable."

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Blumenthal Hearing On Health Issues For Elderly Includes His Brother