Summary: Supporting Nursing Home Staff

supporting nursing home staff. This could range from ensuring they have adequate nurses to cover the number of residents, to encouraging new nursing graduates to join nursing homes to help ease the workload so that nurses have time to interact with residents, or other options. The benefit to such a program is that residents will be more likely to get the socialization they need and be less likely to be lonely, plus they would be developing relationships with the nurses who care for them and not just random volunteers who there may not be a guarantee they’ll see again. The cost however to this program is the cost of paying these nurses to work at the nursing homes since the state may have to help nursing homes pay their staff since a staff
increase could be not affordable by some nursing homes. Plus even if they do not give nurses a monetary incentive to join a nursing home the state will need to pay for the advertising and promotions promoting going into the nursing home field. The final way that the state can aid in helping elder mental and physical health is by regularly evaluating its state nursing home inspection programs. These programs are in place to inspect nursing homes for proper medicine allotment, mental and physical abuse and food preparation standards (Health). Despite this however elder abuse in nursing homes still exists which shows that there may still be flaws in the system. Another suggestion for the responsibility of the community to elders was individuals or groups creating cards to send to senior homes. This is an idea that has been used by service groups wishing to send well wishes to anonymous members of needy populations. The main problem with this suggestion is that it will temporarily relieve loneliness it is unlikely to work for the long term . In addition to this it doesn’t actually address the problem.