Aventura Nursing Home Abuse Blog

With one of the highest populations of senior citizens in the United States, Florida is home to the largest system of senior care services and facilities. Families and friends of patients in nursing homes are often warned to look out for elder abuse, but those problems can exist at home as well.

Abuse is often too subtle to notice at the beginning, according to a victims advocate counselor specializing in older Floridians. It can begin with a small request for financial help, a seemingly reasonable compromise about care or other way that an aging person slowly loses control over his or her own life.

Placing one of your parents in a Florida nursing home or assisted living facility can be difficult, but you may feel more comfortable doing so if you have complete faith in the care your loved one will receive. Regrettably, however, statistics show that elder abuse and neglect is rampant in many such facilities and that many seniors who live there suffer physical and emotional abuse at some point during their stay.

In recent years, NPR reported that a new form of elder abuse has become increasingly common at many of today’s continuing care facilities, and it involves abusing elders through social media. Nowadays, many nursing home and assisted living facility employees have various social media profiles, and some of them are using them to humiliate and exploit facility residents.

Nursing home patients are one of the most vulnerable populations in the United States. When you make the difficult decision to place your loved one in an assisted living facility, you are trusting the staff to provide the care and treatment necessary, but sometimes the exact opposite happens. Nursing home abuse is unfortunately rampant, and in many cases, the staff do not treat patients' ailments at all.

This may be the case for health problems that are especially common in nursing homes. Because they occur so frequently, staff may simply overlook the issue, but this can cause serious injury and even death to patients. The following are three examples of ailments that may not receive proper treatment.

Children are our future, while our elders are the basis of our wisdom and culture. It may be difficult to manage the care of our parents and grandparents, but it is vital to their health and well-being as well as upholding the Florida laws that protect them.

Elder abuse can take many forms. Physical and mental abuse are often the most likely and the most concerning, while psychological abuse is usually a slower-moving issue that affects victims over a long period of time. Financial abuse, however, has increased a marked amount in the last two years.