the quality of Black seniors’ nursing home care is drastically behind that of white seniors

[ccharles000]

Originally published by The Chicago Reporter

Luzella Roberts knew something was wrong when a nurse in the dialysis room at her nursing home approached her with a syringe and moved it toward her left arm. It was Sept. 25, 2006, and Roberts’ sixth day at International Nursing and Rehab Center in Chicago’s New City neighborhood.

There were explicit instructions on her medical chart not to administer dialysis through that arm, said the family’s lawyer Steven M. Levin. Instead, they were to use a catheter that was surgically implanted in Roberts’ right arm. It was there for the dialysis treatments that Roberts, an African American, received three times a week to remove waste from her body, Levin said.

But now, the nurse was preparing to insert the needle in Roberts’ left arm. It was the same arm that for 60 years had cooked dinner for her husband, dressed her four children, and had three weeks earlier cupped her newest great-granddaughter.

Roberts didn’t have an M.D. or RN behind her name and thought, perhaps, that the medical staff knew something she didn’t. So she kept quiet.

An hour went by with the needle still intact. Then two hours. Then three before Roberts’ daughter, Cynthia Wade, stopped by to visit and saw her mother’s arm and face gray and swollen. Wade began screaming at the nurse to remove the needle. As she did, Roberts’ arm began to bleed uncontrollably and she was rushed to the emergency room.

http://www.colorlines.com/article.php?ID=563&p=1

[BrklynLiberal]

1. This is truly a horror....particularly considering that the care in white nursing

homes is so atrocious!!!! To be even worse than that is inconceivable!!!

[patrice]

3. tip-of-the-iceberg - Money does not insure quality of care.

Staffing shortages drive everything and, of course, Cultural issues.

Voice of experience here; I won't tell you my MIL's story, but suffice it to say she got okay care, just okay, until the end and . . .

I will never forget.

[patrice]

2. I hope the new hybridized financing models that are being discussed

http://www.ncbcapitalimpact.org/default.aspx?id=146

will create Reforms as a result of the more egalitarian collaborative processes that these smaller, more person-centered homes will require.

[ccharles000]

4. kick

[ccharles000]

5. one more kick

[Libertyfirst]

6. We try to have someone visit mother very day and at varying times so

that the nursing home personnel are never sure when we will pop in. It seem to be doing fine at this place. At the last place she almost died from over medication.

[BlooInBloo]

7. Typical of all healthcare in America, unfortunately.

[Iggo]

8. Oops. I read it wrong.

Sorry.