Nursing Home Neglect

Nursing home neglect is a specific type of nursing home abuse which involves poor care or a failure to provide care that causes harm to a nursing home resident.

Nursing home neglect typically includes the refusal or failure of nursing home caregivers to fulfill their responsibilities to a resident. This includes failure to provide basic needs that result in physical or mental harm to any resident in the home’s care.

Types of nursing home abuse include physical, mental, verbal and sexual abuse. All types of nursing home abuse are considered a form of elder abuse.

Nursing home abuse can be committed by a member of the nursing home’s staff, another resident, a guest or other people who pass through the home. But nursing home neglect tends to fall directly on the nursing home and its staff.

Causes of nursing home neglect include inadequate training, negligence in hiring new applicants and understaffing.

Nursing homes may fail to adequately train new hires, leading to improper care for residents, medication mistakes and other problems that lead to neglect.

Inadequate training has long been a leading cause of nursing home neglect. In fact, nursing staff identified inadequate training as a major factor in nursing home neglect and abuse in a 2003 report from the National Research Council.

More recently, researchers found that care managers in neglect and abuse cases lacked awareness of elder neglect and did not have strategies to identify or manage nursing home neglect, according to a 2020 study in BMC Health Services Research.

Failure to perform adequate background checks when hiring nursing home staff can increase the risk of neglect.

A thorough vetting system should check for proper licenses and certifications for new hires and review any background of criminal history or drug and alcohol abuse.

Low wages and long hours can fuel staff shortages at nursing homes. Understaffing can also increase stress among overworked caregivers.

Understaffing can cause nursing homes to fail to meet basic resident needs, according to a 2020 elder law case study of a large, for-profit nursing home chain that appeared in the journal Inquiry.

The COVID-19 pandemic only made staff shortages worse. More than 20% of nursing homes in the United States reported staffing shortages in December 2020, according to a study by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

There are several types of nursing home neglect — most of them are based on lack of care that the resident is incapable of providing for themself.

Signs of neglect are wide ranging. You should look for them when visiting a relative in a nursing home.

You can report nursing home neglect to the staff of the nursing home or to state and federal agencies.

If you see signs of nursing home neglect, talk to the older adult to find out what happened. Take your concerns to the staff immediately. If the issue isn’t resolved, ask to talk with senior members of the nursing home.

If it is a serious problem — or is still not resolved — you can contact your local nursing home ombudsman or other state and federal agencies that investigate and address nursing home neglect.