Substance Abuse In A Nursing Home

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The purpose of a nursing home is to keep our fragile elders in a place where they will feel comfortable and in the hands of a medical team. Elders who are in need of assistance and care land in a nursing home and stay there. The purpose of a nursing home is to live there until the time comes; so the jobs of the nurses, certified nurse assistant, companions, and the activities people is to form a smooth living and a comfortable passing. What others fail to understand is the difference between what indeed happens behind the scenes versus what is supposed to happen in a nursing home. Anyone who has never worked or enter this nursing home would think it is an asylum with monotonous colors and bells ringing nonstop. This resident’s home (that I …show more content…
Nursing home commercials also advertise how the employees are content with the work they do and always have physical interaction with the residents. In contrast to what Jane Carter and Val Walker say about the job; “It is awful and abusive here. The residents are snobby and rude and can hurt you!” (Carter). Surprisingly enough, they stated that the policy is that if a resident do physically hurt or abuse one of the CNA’s, the CNA’s are to do a drug test and take a urine sample. As moronic as it sound, it is true. Jane claims to be bitten, spit on, scratched, and smacked in the rear by several of the residents and had no choice but leave it as it is. These CNA’s at Royal Pines are either the ones being harassed by each other or by the residents or the ones abusing the residents. Even after testing the CNA’s, the supervisors do not guide and do not solve the resident’s behavior since “it is not their fault”. CNA’s do have the capability to abuse residents, and that is by simply not responding to the resident’s call bells. “I have seen other employees just walk by the rooms without helping them and tell me later that it is not their job to work on that specific resident, they say it is not their assigned hallway or resident” (Walker). Meanwhile, the nurses have no clue to what is happening with the CNA’s or the resident. “I only give them medication and that’s about it. But they are very nice people, of course you have some that are not there in their minds anymore, but yeah” (Thompson) says a nurse who has little to no interaction with the residents. This proves that the ones who are doing the dirty work are the certified nurse assistants while the nurse’s job is to distribute the medication. On the other hand the residents are either ignored, criticized, or worse yelled at by a