okay
well i'll just briefly um i worked in a nursing home so i kind of know from way back uh how things used to be run and i think there's been definite changes of nursing homes but
i think uh if i personally had to put one of my parents in a nursing home they would have to be pretty bad off
to where i couldn't take care of them at all it would be something that you know i would certainly if they're forgetting things or whatever i'd prefer to have them at home or have them in what they call now home care
uh-huh
where somebody comes in and they cook meals and they clean their house for them that kind of thing so they still have their own independence and not reliable you know they don't have to be in a nursing home situation but uh
i don't think the nursing homes when i was working in them were very much understaffed very much uh in need of good personnel um
i think the patients weren't given the quality of care that i wouldn't have you know i look at it and say thank God i
got out of that kind of situation but uh they they were not given the time and they were not given the money basically to staff appropriately people to help and
yeah
uh-huh
i can remember lifting a patient all by myself simply because there was not another person to help it's either let leave the patient in bed all day long
or get them up and i would have preferred to get them up than than to leave them in bed all day but uh
um so i think nursing homes are have changed i'm not quite sure but hopefully they have
yeah well the i guess i haven't had that much experience i've only seen like my great grandparents in a nursing home but
um-hum
yeah
i have an aunt who lived on her own until she was well in her nineties and then she she got sick and she ended up in a nursing home
sure
um-hum
and my parents went to visit her and it got to the point where the nursing it seemed like the nursing home didn't want to deal with her anymore
sure
and so they gave her drugs to keep her asleep
yeah i i think that's that can happen and i think in the nursing home that i worked for
i wasn't quite sure of it but i'm sure that some of the patients were uh given medication to keep them in uh quiet and and
nice sedative state
yeah yeah and they would just lay all day long and uh
the ones that they also put mentally ill patients
in the same they were not on the same you know ward but they they were in the same nursing home so that these mentally ill patients could walk into where the other uh older people that were in there for reasons of uh
you know age uh the mentally ill patients could walk right in into the rooms or do whatever they wanted to basically because if you weren't there to watch them and keep them in their own wing they could they had freedom to just walk around and a lot of them were
i think there was a couple that were schizophrenic and i remember one time watching one of the uh schizophrenic patients actually go out on i don't know what they call it a binge or whatever you want to say it but
uh-huh
she grabbed a hold of this and it was kind of funny when i look back at it but i mean i remember the patient getting very upset
that person woman actually pulled uh the other person's hair i mean she just came up right behind him and pulled his hair you know and it was a guy that was
just really upset i mean he's what the hell are you think you're doing you know and i laughed at it then but then i'm thinking God you know if i had to put my parents in that nursing home i wouldn't want them there
yeah
so i think there's laws now that kind of protect that nursing homes either have to keep the mentally ill totally away from these people
and not in the same type of facilities even though they're aging mentally ill they are still mentally ill and a lot of these older people have their you know
they're not insane or anything like that they don't have these tendencies to to lash out
be violent
but seeing that kind of made me think twice about jeez i wouldn't put my mother father in that nursing home at all
was this in a big town or a little town
a small town
oh really
yeah yeah
it seem like the small town nursing homes
i don't know
i there's a lot more personal attention
i don't know i i kind of look at it this way i think
if you have a big city area i think there's more people to keep watch on it
uh-huh you have more options
and yeah yeah and you have more competition and i think nursing homes have to be better than when there's one nursing home for a whole community
and this is back in nineteen seventy seven that i worked there
uh-huh
and i look back at it and say jeez you know i it would have to be awfully bad for me to put my parents in there but my grandmother uh later on got cancer and uh could no longer well actually she
