Over the course of four months, task force members met with approximately 50 nursing home residents, owners, researchers, advocates and experts in the field. Based on what they learned, what are they recommending?
"Emphasis on recovery, therapeutic care and adequate appropriate housing in the community will significantly reduce the number of younger nursing home residents living with vulnerable older adults in institutional settings and thus significantly reduce the potential violent crimes," the final report read.
According to the Chicago Tribune, key recommendations in the report include:
- Doing a better job of screening the people who are admitted to nursing homes in order to prevent violent criminals from living side by side with vulnerable older adults.
- Placing dangerous mentally ill people in secure, monitored facilities where they can get the treatment they need. These facilities might be public or private psychiatric centers, or they might be segregated wings of nursing homes or specialized facilities known as forensic nursing homes.
- Raising standards for facilities that accept psychiatric patients. In general, nursing home staff members are not properly trained or equipped to deal with psychiatric patients. Staff members should be better trained on the needs of psychiatric patients. Facilities that don't comply with this training could face steeper fines.
- Creating more home- and community-based service options for psychiatric patients who are currently housed in nursing homes. The goal is to move many of the thousands of mentally ill who currently live in nursing homes into settings where they can receive better, more personalized care. Another plus of this idea: patients tend to thrive in small group settings like the ones being proposed.
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