Nursing Assistant Resources On The Web

For all the talk about how much better health care is in Great Britain, when I read articles like this I cannot agree with the pundits. Great Britain is far behind the US when it comes to health care, especially with it’s older citizens. The US is decades ahead on all matters related to nutritional health of our nursing home residents.

Hospitals and care homes are to face a major inquiry into the way frail elderly people are allowed to go hungry.

It follows research backed by charity studies that more than half of all older patients are at risk of malnutrition.

Ministers have agreed to support the investigation into which patients arrive on wards or in homes suffering from malnutrition and how their treatment is handled.

The inquiry comes in the wake of reports which say malnutrition among the elderly is widespread and that nurses and staff regularly neglect to ensure that vulnerable people are helped to eat meals.

Meals are left out of the reach of patients or residents, critics of hospital and care home standards have alleged.

They say that staff frequently fail to help patients eat, or remove meals before they have had a chance to eat them.

Of course the problems are the same: Not enough staff to assist with meals…but what about the standards? And why is this ONLY beginning to get attention in GB? We’ve known about nutritional problems in elderly who reside in nursing homes, here in the US for YEARS. so much that it is regulated by our government.

The Daily Mail has highlighted neglect of older people in its Dignity for the Elderly campaign.

Last year the Government launched its own ‘Dignity in Care’ campaign aimed at ending, among other abuses and instances of neglect, malnutrition of older people because care staff are too busy or otherwise pre-occupied to help them eat.

The new survey will involve medical and support workers in hospitals and staff in care homes who will answer detailed questions about their screening of newly-admitted patients and residents over three days later this month.

Professor Marinos Elia of BAPEN said: “Malnutrition is preventable and if treated early can improve outcomes for patients and residents.

“In the long run, treatment saves the NHS and social care system money as the cost of treatment is small compared with the potential benefits to be gained.”

Like the US, GB will face many obstacles when they try to “fix” this problem; and the NHS certainly won’t pay more for any fixes that are recommended. Nations all over the world are discovering the bad results of long term care facilities- and a few are looking at alternatives instead of short term fixes.