Problems with Nursing Home Staff

Problems with Nursing Home Staff

At most nursing homes, there are numerous caring and compassionate nursing staff members. However, there are always some staff members who are lazy or just there for a paycheck. This poses a serious problem because the good staff members have to pick up more work and it means less time devoted to caring of residents.

Many nursing homes are understaffed. Employees who are working must pick up the slack, leaving them burdened with too much to do including paperwork and unable to provide attentive care to every resident. This leads to neglecting residents, particularly residents who are at risk of falling and those with serious conditions that require a lot of care.

At some nursing homes, the director of nursing is not sensitive to residents' needs. For example, at one nursing home, a director of nursing did not want any CNAs to spend too much one-on-one time with residents and she reprimanded a caring CNA who spent some time comforting a resident with dementia who was crying. Also, some head nurses do whatever they can to convince their staff to withhold important information from families about serious injuries such as falls or what led to their loved one’s death. Some CNAs and nurses have lost their jobs as a result of reporting abuse. Look at the example of Krista Salda, a nurse at Brian Center who went against the wishes of her boss by reporting Luis Gomez, a well-liked male CNA who sexually assaulted multiple women at the Brian Center in Waynesville, NC by reporting him to the police. A few days later, Krista Salda was fired. Krista shared that she doubts she could work in nursing homes again and that facilities are reluctant to hire whistleblowers. Not many nurses could have done what Krista did. Many nurses and aides do not want to risk losing their jobs.

Some caring CNAs after seeing tragic things such as devastating falls quit their jobs because they just cannot tolerate seeing elderly people being neglected. Also, some of those CNAs get tired of working with CNAs who are lazy and uncaring. They feel it is hard to work as a team. Two CNAs often have to transfer a patient from bed to wheelchair or vice versa and if one is uncaring or not well-trained it makes things difficult.

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