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| Helga and Charles Amidon |
BEDFORD, Mass. – The nurse’s aide was
busy getting a patient ready for bed when she noticed a commotion behind
a privacy curtain on the other side of the room. She heard Russ
Bonanno, a 94-year-old veteran, shout, “Ow, ow, ow.”
“It
sounded like fighting,” said Julee, who asked that her last name not be
used out of fear of retaliation. When she went to check what was
happening, she saw another aide trying to hoist Bonanno from his
wheelchair to his bed, normally a two-person job.
Julee said she watched the other aide simply toss the elderly dementia patient onto the bed.
“Let
me tell you how brutal that guy was with the veteran,” Julee wrote to
her supervisor two days after the alleged incident May 18. “After he was
done, (we) went and checked Mr. Bonanno. The guy was wet. Everything
needed to be changed.”
The aide accused of roughly
handling Bonanno quietly resigned, but Julee, the aide who blew the
whistle, was fired two weeks later. She said her supervisor told her she
had attendance problems.
Welcome to one of the
lowest-rated nursing homes for veterans in the nation run by the U.S.
Department of Veterans Affairs. The facility, at the VA hospital in
Bedford, Massachusetts, is among 11 nationwide to earn the
lowest-possible one-star rating from the agency based on both overall
quality and the results of surprise inspections. The ratings are on a
scale of one to five, with one being the lowest.
Full Article & Source:
Bedsores, neglect, alleged abuse: Inside low-rated VA nursing homes
I can't resolve the fact that nursing homes who are abusing their patients by neglect or abuse aren't prosecuted and held accountable. If a person was at home and the relative abused and neglected, that's a crime. But when nursing homes do it, we're lucky if they even get their wrists slapped. It's not right.
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