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Resolving Grievances in the Nursing Home

Name: Resolving Grievances in the Nursing Home
Author: Monk
ISBN: 9780231057028

by Monk

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Overview

This book presents the most comprehensive and systematic analysis to date of the role of the ombudsman in the fields of health and long-term care.
Starting with a review of the historical, philosophical, and political antecedents of the Swedish ombudsman, the authors place the idea of nursing home ombudsmanship within the context of an expanding population of older people who may require institutional care in their more advanced years.
The authors point out that a significant portion of the more than one million older persons in nursing facilities suffers neglect or even abuse from poorly trained and overburdened staff. They examine the effectiveness of a program specially designed to protect the rights of the elderly in these institutions. The book presents information from New York and other states' experiences in implementing the federal mandate for a system of long-term care ombudsman programs. It explores the question of whether volunteer and federally supported advocacy programs succeeded in introducing an effective system of community scrutiny of nursing home care. The complex roles and functions of the community ombudsman are assessed in terms of their capacity to improve institutional life and reverse abusive and neglectful treatment of frail elderly residents in long-stay institutions.
A book that may well foreshadow a direction of advocacy in the 1980s, this clearly demonstrates that ombudsmen and other advocates can serve as significant humanizing elements in institutional care.

About the Author, Monk

Abraham Monk is Brookdale Professor of Gerontology at the Columbia University School of Social Work and Director of the Brookdale Institute on Aging and Adult Human Development.

Lenard W. Kaye is a Research Scientist at the Columbia University School of Social Work and Associate Director of the Brookdale Institute.

Howard Litwin is a Lecturer at the Paul Baerwald School of Social Work, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Columbia University Press