Nursing Home Abuse Lawyer California Blog

Five nursing home workers who participated in a November 2009 prank involving elderly dementia patients in a Ukiah, Calif., nursing home have been sentenced.

Accused of enacting a prank where they coated 7 elderly dementia patients from head to foot in a slippery ointment so they would be slippery when the staff for the next shift arrived, all 5 had their nursing assistant licenses revoked and are ineligible to work in nursing homes again. More

Where once nursing homes residents were restrained by leather bonds or cloth ties, many nursing home staff are now relying on chemicals to sedate and to control residents.

A May 2011 United States Department of Health and Human Services study by the Office of the Inspector General found that 305,000 (about 14%) nursing home residents had Medicare claims for atypical antipsychotic drugs. Of these, about 1 in 5 residents were prescribed antipsychotics in a manner that violated government standards. For example, they may be given for too long a time or in too high a dose. More