Another article from Huffington Post, about nursing homes. This reflects a sad state of affairs that I’m afraid is true.

Philip Cohen:

Even as the poor quality of nursing home care has become a cliché, nursing home care costs have been rising faster than those for services in general. According to economist Nancy Folbre, writing in Science, this has to do with increasing demand for paid care as women enter the workforce, and as they get better job opportunities. But the other “problem” is that care workers actually care about their clients, which makes them behave inefficiently. In response, employers create bureaucracy to keep the care workers in line. Because good care work requires hard-to-measure skills and behavior, this defensive action by employers may actually increase costs and reduce the quality of care. Folbre writes: “Unlike the idealized consumers of standard economic theory, care recipients may not know themselves what they need, and they don’t enjoy a menu of many alternative choices. Their very lack of consumer sovereignty makes them vulnerable to institutional pressures to cut costs by lowering aspects of quality that are difficult to measure.”

The elephant in the room of the care quality crisis is gender. The bedrock of nursing home care is the staff of nursing aides, orderlies and attendants. There are 589,000 of them, with average annual wages are $23,000 - and 89% of them are women.

So, by setting low standards to begin with, we see how this happens. Also, counting on residents being uneducated about their rights as well as what good care really is, the industry takes advantage. Add to this the lack of respect given to CNA’s, as evidenced by low pay and bad benefits, we see a pattern of institutional pressure for sure.

When will this change? CNA’s must become their own advocates before they can do so for their residents. Luckily we have many family groups and other resident advocacy organizations standing up. But how effective is their work when they push the very buttons that created this mess in the first place? Political action and trust in certain groups and parties is close minded. Everyone who really cares must think outside the box and come up with other solutions.

I know Patti has a rule about no political posting here, but I’m putting that aside for the time because a couple items have caught my attention.

1) Several weeks ago Kim posted about the LTC industry, and the people who work within this industry, have no trust in Barack Obama when it comes to reforming health care. Surprisingly no comments were left on that post.

2) Over at the PHI Blog they have made a big deal that the Democrats have mentioned direct care workers and fair wages and more training.

3) In fact, the Republicans have mentioned long term care and it’s problems in their past two platform drafts.

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