Attorney Fights Nursing Homes that Put Profit Over Care

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By Gregory Crofton

Profit shouldn’t be priority when caring for older people, but that’s a reality and it’s producing “systemic negligence” throughout the nursing home industry.

Running a long-term care facility, or nursing home, as a for-profit corporate-owned business can lead to intentional short staffing and in turn bad care.

Families featured in “Stolen Time,” a documentary directed by Helene Klodawsky, hoped long-term facilities would improve care for their loved ones. Instead they encountered increased health problems and sometimes an early death.

“Stolen Time” exposes what’s happening in Canadian nursing homes through cases handled by personal injury attorney Melissa Miller.

“The individual staff, they want to be doing a better job, they just aren’t being given the resources to do it,” Miller says in the film. “Where I’m placing blame is with the corporation who have the decision-making power to do something for these residents but are simply choosing not to.”

In an industry known for non-disclosure agreements, the doc gets us behind closed doors to see, for example, one overworked nurse refuse to help a woman, then berate and shove her after she fails to properly leave her walker for a chair.

Staff often wants to give more personalized attention to their residents but they don’t have the time to provide it. Still it is the staff members who get blamed when a fall happens or a bedsore appears.

These type of events and injuries are signs of systemic negligence that can lead to early death. I can speak to this issue because a relative, who lived in a care facility for about 18 months, experienced such negligence.

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She was sedated to make her hostile behavior more manageable for staff but then wasn’t repositioned on a regular basis and developed a pressure sore (also known as a bedsore) near her tailbone.

Soon we heard she was in “hospice” and prescribed excessive amounts of morphine to manage pain caused by the growing bedsore. Months later she stopped speaking, her digestive system shut down, and she died a lonely death.

I was not there to witness the process, but it all seemed very much like euthanasia without the compassion or the companionship that should come with it. As the population of seniors in the United States booms, more of us will have to decide whether and when to leave our mother or father in the care of such a facility.

Will care there be better than we could have provided at home? Or will we show up to the facility and attempt to provide the needed care ourselves? Or when it comes time for any one of us to require long-term care, will we have the free will to decide our own fate?

“Stolen Time” is not currently available to view, but you can learn more about the documentary and how you might be able to see it here.

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Watch the trailer below.