Other nursing home safety precautions include:
- Cameras in entrances and locked security systems keep nursing home staff informed about people who come and go. Good nursing homes want to encourage visitors and need to keep security as unobtrusive as possible in order to offer a home-like atmosphere, while still maintaining a safe environment for residents. Cameras and check-in systems can help keep residents safe without alarming residents.
- Wandering is a danger for people in certain stages of Alzheimer's disease. Again, a good home should not seem like a prison, yet people with Alzheimer's need to be secured for their own safety. Many homes have cleverly disguised, secure exits in their locked Alzheimer's wings, so that the doors can't be opened without codes, yet the coming and going of staff and visitors isn't accompanied by the jingle of "jailer's keys."
- Light beams can "guard" hallways or exits, as well. When someone breaks through a beam, staff is alerted. This kind of system can even be used to let people know if a person goes out of his room.
- Cameras can be put in rooms if necessary, to alert staff to activities of an elder.
- People who have extensive training in how to cope with Alzheimer's behavior are less apt to agitate an elder with over-correcting or scolding. Once caregivers understand how best to handle situations that may arise, they are more likely to respond appropriately, which can keep a potentially abusive situation from arising.
- Nursing home staff, in most states, are required to report abusive behavior of other staff members. There are more safe-guards in place than in the past to make this kind of reporting a top priority.
- Laws to prevent restraining residents have presented nursing homes with sometimes complicated conflicts, but the good facilities have found ways to keep elders safe while not restraining them, a method that was considered acceptable in years past. Restraints include over-medicating to sedate people into "compliance." The drugs used in the past to restrain elders and keep them docile created health issues for many. Likely they hastened a few deaths, but those were the days when people didn't go to a nursing home to live, they went to die. Raised standards now prevent such treatment, in most states. People are expected to live their days in the nursing home with as much quality in their lives as possible, and that means more hands-on care and less over-medicating. The new approach is generally safer for the elder.
Trying to maintain a home-like atmosphere for vulnerable elders, while keeping them safe, is not an easy task. Yet, raised expectations from the public about the atmosphere of modern nursing homes has forced some of these issue to be examined and improved. Culture change in nursing homes has encouraged a blend of technology and increased hands-on care to make the lives of our elders in nursing homes happier as well as safer. There's still a long way to go, and perfection may never be reached, but safety and happiness of elders in nursing homes is becoming an expectation, not just a fluke. That's great news.
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Elder care author, columnist and speaker Carol Bradley Bursack is an AgingCare.com contributing editor and moderator of the
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Read her full biography