Patients found abandoned at Castro Valley, Calif nursing home

[Demo_Chris]

62. When I was young I worked at a nursing home. This is what I saw...

We had one RN. She was the director of nursing, and she clearly made great money. She was also a worthless wretch, and I don't know that she ever even looked at a patient.

Each shift had one LPN who spent their shift distributing medications, charting, and doing any special care that was necessary.

Everything else was done by CNAs (which is what I was). On a typical night I had between a minimum of twenty and a maximum of forty patients. These patients were always non-ambulatory so they required full service care. So you know, there is no possible way to take proper care of that many people by yourself. It just cannot be done, and even at the time I was fairly sure that it was against the law. One time, due to a staff shortage, I actually had almost 80 patients. It was a freaking joke -- but who are you going to tell. Everyone is in on it, including the state and the doctors, and your just some flunky on the bottom, lower than the maintenance staff or janitor. Whenever the state inspectors came around it was ALWAYS on day shift, ALWAYS with prior notice, and the facility always bulked up the staff while the inspectors were there. That was the only time you would ever see any of the managment on the floor.

At that time, it would have been around 1990 I suppose, I was earning $5.50 an hour. Not $5.50 to start, that was it. That's what they were paying CNAs.

Would I have knowingly walked off and left patients to their doom? Of course not. No one would. But if they tell you to go home you go home. We weren't being paid even for what we already did, let alone above-and-beyond after hours concern. You did your eight and you hit the gate. Yeah, some of the people working there cared, but that was care they arrived with when they started the job. The job erroded that quickly enough. Care is expensive, it takes time, and you don't have that. You will only get concern from employees who are treated and paid like professionals.

Right now our for-profit healthcare system is a joke, and this is just one example of why. If we, as a society, want seniors to receive proper care then we, as a society, need to demand it and pay for it -- not throw up our hands and blame the people at the bottom when it goes haywire.