California’s Nursing Home Care

Re your editorial “Nursing Homes’ Shame,” July 29:

Your editorial omitted one crucial aspect of the nursing home dilemma. It is time to examine whether nursing homes should exist at all and whether our society really cares about the warehousing of our elderly.

Hanging in my office is a 1978 Paul Conrad cartoon that appeared in your paper. It depicts a junkyard for automobiles and is titled “Convalescent Care of the Aged in America.” Despite numerous investigations, including California’s own Little Hoover Commission, 20 years have elapsed and the only proposed solutions then and now appear to be more regulations and stricter sanctions.

Viable alternatives to nursing homes need to be considered. The public funds spent on a patient in a nursing home should be offered to the patient or his/her family for home care. Other alternatives that should be explored are small residential facilities that would provide nutrition, hydration and basic nursing services on a limited basis.

Nursing homes provide very little nursing and they are definitely not a home. If we are serious about how we take care of our elderly population, we need to offer them an alternative.

VICTOR ARKIN

Canoga Park

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I have worked both as a nurse’s aide and as an RN in extended care facilities. A source of the continuing abuse of dependent people is to be seen from the graphic in your editorial. The majority of the funding is from Medi-Cal, and the majority of providers are bottom-line-oriented profiteers.

The wages for the majority of nurse’s aides are abysmal, without benefits, in work that calls for dedication and caring, so that the profit may be passed on to the investors. Many of my peers depersonalize the patients in order to survive psychologically. As an RN, I was tempted with the seduction of bonuses to bend rules and falsify documentation. I played dumb, documented the deceit, reported it and left.

The licensed staff that stay have few options for any other work. The two places that are good providers where I have practiced fall into the nonprofit column. Interestingly enough, they have some of the best pay and benefits.

Unless Californians are willing to reverse the knee-jerk response to the destruction of social safety nets (welfare) and encourage nonprofit facilities, this problem will simply not go away.

GEORGE W. HEATH

Garden Grove

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Discouraging and frightening. Those were my first thoughts on reading your editorial on the poor quality of care in one-third of the nursing homes. Well, if one-third have severe problems, what about the two-thirds that give good to excellent care? Should we punish those too?

I have been in this field, caring for the frail, demented elderly for 13 years. I do not hurt people for a living. Neither do my staff, many of whom have cared for our residents for more than 20 years. Please do not condemn the good with the bad. Our staff are hard workers, who take much abuse and return only good care and love, and we are typical of the people who work in this setting.

CAROL DeMARCO RN

San Gabriel