Creating An Environment Ripe for Illinois Nursing Home Abuse?: Housing Seniors with Felons and Mentally Ill Patients Can Be a Recipe for Disaster
According to the Chicago Tribune, a string of violent incidents in Illinois nursing homes in the last 17 months involving patients inflicting harm on other residents exemplifies the kind of dangers that can result when elderly and sick nursing home residents are housed with mentally ill patients—especially those with criminal records.
Government records reveal that over 15% of the 92,225 nursing home residents residing in Illinois assisted living facilities are mentally ill. 3,000 of these mentally ill patients were convicted of serious felony crimes:
• 82 murderers
• 185 armed robbers
• 179 sex offenders
A number of mentally ill nursing home residents are significantly younger and physically stronger than the older, frailer patients that share the Illinois facility with them. This can prove to be a problem.
For example, police arrested a 21-year-old nursing home patient who raped an elderly elderly resident in her bedroom. The alleged attacker has a criminal record in addition to acute psychiatric issues. In another nursing home abuse incident, a 24-year-old mentally ill woman with a history of prostitution and drug use beat a man in a wheelchair so badly that he died of his head injuries.
Yet according to The Tribune, the nursing home industry, law enforcement officials, and the government are not doing enough to oversee the young residents who are transferred to Illinois nursing homes after spending time in psychiatric wards, shelters, and jail. The state also isn’t doing a complete enough job when it comes to performing background checks on new residents, whose criminal records are then understated. The Tribune also discovered that the Illinois nursing homes that house the most felons are often the ones with the lowest nursing staff levels.
Meantime, the Health Care Council of Illinois, the state’s largest nursing home owners' association, is questioning the practice of allowing sick or geriatric patients to live with mentally ill criminals, including those with felony records. Obviously not all mentally ill patients are a danger to others, but there are those who have caused serious injury to or killed a resident.
It is a nursing home’s responsibility to supervise all of its residents. This means making sure that patients that could pose a danger to other residents are either kept in a separate area of the facility and/or are supervised more closely. Failure to fulfill this duty of care is nursing home negligence, especially if one patient ends up raping, beating, molesting, or killing another resident.
There are ways to prevent these horrible crimes from happening. Our Chicago nursing home neglect lawyers know how traumatic it can be for your loved one to become the victim of a violent crime because the people you hired to provide nursing care failed to do their job.
Illinois nursing homes mix felons, seniors, Chicago Tribune, September 29, 2009
Mentally ill endanger nursing home patients
Related Web Resources:
Nursing Homes in Illinois
