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Having worked as a Business Office Manager in a nursing home and therefore having firsthand knowledge of the patients and their caregivers I would emphatically state that the elderly should be cared for by their family until there is absolutely no other choice. I sincerely hope that I never have to put a family member in a nursing home or become a patient at one myself.

Anyone is going to be happier and fare better in the comfort of familiar surroundings. It is a well known fact that attitude has everything to do with the healing process when a patient is battling a severe illness. Going to a nursing home already places the patient at a disadvantage, arriving under stress in an unfamiliar place. They often feel rejected and abandoned by their family and loved ones and spend hours crying. Some patients never overcome that feeling and their days are spent in lonely tears.

Loss of dignity is a severe blow to anyone's self esteem. The patients are herded like cattle to a common bath area, often rolled in geriatric chairs by their CNA to the showers with nothing more than a sheet draped over them and I have seen them sent down the hall completely naked. No, the nursing home I worked at was not unlike the rest. All of them operate in pretty much the same manner and most are as understaffed in nursing care as the hospitals. As a matter of fact, the nursing home I worked for was considered to be the best in the area and there were several.

Bed sores develop often because of the lack of sufficient staff. One or two CNAs (Certified Nursing Assistant) will be assigned to each hall. These halls hold as many as thirty to forty patients. It goes to reason that the CNA cannot sit with your family member twenty four hours a day.

Not only do bed sores develop, the patients are often subjected to, and catch, terribly communicable diseases like MRSA, a highly contagious, serious, and often deadly form of Staph infection. These patients are isolated and all precautions taken once it is discovered they have MRSA or equally serious communicable diseases but it has left others exposed to it before it was diagnosed. These diseases are often picked up during hospital stays and brought back into the nursing home.

Pneumonia, other respiratory illnesses, and influenza can race through a nursing home where patients have compromised immune systems. I lost my own grandmother like this in 1996. An epidemic of influenza hit the nursing home my grandmother had been admitted to two weeks prior,

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