Nadia Kiderman has been at the forefront of the important debate that is now finally taking place about the need for serious and dramatic reform to our elder care industry. This is a dialogue that should have taken place a long time ago; but due to the well-paid government relations and lobbyist specialists, it is a debate that did not take place until now.
What spurred this debate from finally happening in a substantive way you might ask? The Coronavirus pandemic, to be exact. First of all, the number of fatalities that are taking place is unfortunate and unbearable. Because of the sheer amount of neglect in many of these nursing homes over time that clearly has given rise to many of these fatalities, it’s clear as day that reforms to this industry are a long time coming.
Nadia Kiderman is an elder care advocate that has passionately been communicating to masses nationwide – and to various constituencies in the healthcare industry, of the need for reform to this industry. The reason is relatively simple. There has been little in the way of oversight in place in order to ensure that our nation’s most vulnerable demographic and population are taken care of.
Throughout this pandemic, the elderly have been justifiably and properly defined as the group most susceptible to contracting this Coronavirus. But what has been done to adequately protect them? Most of them are laying in elder care facilities such as nursing homes, hoping for the highest quality of care they can get. But unfortunately these facilities were totally ill-equipped to handle this crisis in the first place. The reason is that to begin with, they were already a profit-driven business surgically focused on not patient care, but instead the bottom line.
Whenever a healthcare entity is treating profit as a primary motivator over the well-being of their patients, that is problematic. Unfortunately, when it comes to the elder care industry, this is a systemic problem and in no way limited to simply a few bad actors. On the contrary, it’s something that’s prevalent across nursing home owners no matter the state or region their homes may inhabit.
This is an issue that needs to be dealt with in a legislative fashion to ensure proper protections and protocols are in place to avert and severely mitigate the damage that the next pandemic causes and brings to bare. This needs to stop; and our lawmakers need to act in an expeditious fashion to stop this. It is nauseating to consider that our population’s most vulnerable during this pandemic are trapped inside elder care facilities with nowhere to go; nowhere to hide; and are being provided sub-par care in too many cases and situations.
Nadia Kiderman has written about this on various blogging platforms, and that content would be valuable for any consumer in the healthcare industry looking to become better informed, to read and consume. Unfortunately, there aren’t more advocates on behalf of patients looking to get the message across. This is a rather unfortunate reality.
Lawmakers and legislators need to take action when needed in order to ensure that those that are not complying with regulations that are in place to ensure the highest quality care possible, have their feet held to the fire. There needs to be consequences for the actions of providing our nation’s most vulnerable group that they are paid through government and social programs’ monies to care for, are instead not taken care of in an adequate and professional fashion.
Until these consequences are properly spelled out, there will not be an effective deterrence factor available for all to see. Executives at all nursing homes and assisted living facilities should take notice that if they don’t comply with state and regional standards there will be real and devastating consequences on their businesses. In some cases, if there is willful violations found of the law; then legal actions need to be taken. And there are certainly more than a handful of situations where the need for such action to be taken, already. Let’s learn from our mistakes and look ahead to ensure a safer environment for elderly patients in the system.