“All Behavior is Communication”

Rebecca Mead wrote a great article in the New Yorker called “The Sense of an Ending” about the best ways of responding to people suffering with dementia.  Mead’s article details nursing home care that should be the standard for every and any facility or any person that works with elderly people, whether they be in Nursing Homes, Assisted Living Facilities, or Dementia Care but that is simply not the case.  The quality of care that Mead describes is not the standard that facilities meet.

Currently, we place the frailest and weakest of those in our society in the hands of understaffed, overworked, and poorly trained people.  And then we allow lax enforcement.  For the quality of Nursing Homes to equal the care described at Mead’s facility, there will have to be more rigorous standards and enforcement of those standards. Otherwise, we can look, perhaps not forward to, but certainly at the inevitability of a continued broken system which results in elder abuse and neglect on a national scale.