New Teams to Fight Nursing Home Rapes
July 11 , 2006
New teams of experts appointed to review nursing home rapes and deaths in Illinois will finally be formed, three years after the state legislature proposed the bill.
Nursing home abuse prevention bill was proposed in 2003, but didn’t become a law until last week due to lack of funding. The new law will be financed by money the state gets from fines levied against nursing home facilities.
The abuse prevention teams will be responsible for inspecting all sexual assaults and deaths in nursing homes and make recommendations to prevent further incidents.
The state will create two teams, each with 14 people that come from a variety of backgrounds: a Department of Public Health representative, local law enforcement, experts in mental illness and developmental disabilities, representatives from the state’s attorney’s and attorney general’s offices, advocates of nursing homes and nursing home residents, and others.
While the abuse prevention teams won’t have regulatory authority over the facilities or be able to charge fines, they will have the power to issue reports on investigations and recommend ways to decrease the number of sexual assaults and deaths in nursing homes.
According to Wendy Meltzer, director of Illinois Citizens for Better Care, a nursing home residents’ advocacy organization, an abuse prevention review team would broadly look at the facilities to determine what bigger problems are at play.
There’s nobody looking at this systematically,” Meltzer said. “The surveyors go in and say, ‘this bad thing happened, and we’ll fine you for it.’ The hope was to look at this systemically, look at some underlying causes, see what we can do to fix problems, not just at one facility.”
Illinois state senator Susan Garrett, who proposed the bill in 2003, lamented the three-year wait for the review teams. She cites the rape of a mentally and physically disabled 23-year-old resident of the Alden Village Health Facility for Children and Young Adults, claiming young woman’s assault could have been prevented if the teams had been implemented.
Prior to the rape, the nursing home facility had been cited every year for the last decade in its yearly inspection for a variety of violations, including failure to report seven resident deaths to the state.
“We can’t wait another minute. We need to make sure our nursing home residents are totally protected,” Garrett said.
For more information on Illinois nursing homes, contact us to confer with a nursing home abuse lawyer.
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