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Logo for 2010 Nursing Assistants Week

The National Network of Career Nursing Assistants (NNCNA) has announced that the 33rd Annual National Nursing Assistants Week will take place from June 10-17. Read the full story

According to a recent Swedish study, violence against caregivers is often underreported in nursing homes because the caregivers accept attacks as excusable and an unavoidable part of the job. At the same time, violent acts may sometimes be overreported. The problem is that “violence is in the eye of the beholder,” making it hard for caregivers to know what should and should not be reported.

“Violence in Nursing Homes: Perceptions of Female Caregivers” reports on the results of a study of 41 female members of the nursing staff at three Swedish nursing homes, including eight nursing assistants. The caregivers were asked to react to a vignette in which a male resident being helped by a female caregiver suddenly screams loudly, shakes his fist, calls her derogatory names and scratches and pinches her until a colleague comes to help her.

The caregivers generally considered acts to be violent only if they are intentional, so they generally excuse them in people with dementia. “As long as they are confused…and is in some kind of other world, then I cannot consider it as violence,” one said. And if a resident is not aware of who the caregiver is and does not direct the violence toward that individual, they are less likely to consider it violence.

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Listen to the podcast at the HCHCW website 

“This workforce is uninsured at a rate of twice the general population,” says Carol Regan, director of the PHI Health Care for Health Care Workers campaign, of direct-care workers in long-term care services. “Yet they’re much more likely to be injured or sick on the job. They have the highest rate of injury and illness of any workforce: higher than truckers, higher than roofers, higher than miners. Which is astonishing.”

Regan outlines the health care dilemma faced by direct-care workers in a seven-and-a-half-minute podcast about The Invisible Care Gap, a recent publication from HCHCW.

Nursing homes not only can but must change the way they operate, becoming better places to live and work. Only then will they be able to reduce the epidemic of violence that currently plagues them, according to an article in the Journal of Gerontological Nursing, Vol. 34 No. 3.

CNAs often experience “harassment, threats, and assaults” from residents, and the number of those incidents is probably “seriously underestimated,” according to “Policy Recommendations on the Prevention of Violence in Long-Term Care Facilities.” (The article is free to subscribers only; others must pay.)

Those attacks cause emotional distress, which can lead to more confrontations. “Frustrated and fearful, CNAs’ voices might be louder and their movements rougher, causing residents to respond in an aggressive manner,” notes the report. A vicious cycle of abuse can also occur when, “in retaliation, such aggressive behavior results in staff-to-resident abuse.”

Low reimbursement levels lead to low staffing levels at most nursing homes, which is a major contributing factor, the report says. “CNAs are more apt to deliver care in a rushed, rough, and hurried manner when assigned a large number of residents. A hurried approach is likely to cause residents to become more aggressive, thus increasing the risk of assault.”

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Many of the direct-care workers who provide consumer-directed care in California cannot access workers’ compensation assistance when they are injured on the job, according to a recent study. And that finding has “important implications for workers’ health and the sustainability of consumer-directed programs-within and beyond California,” according to authors Teresa Scherzer and Nicole Wolfe of the University of California, San Francisco, PAS Center.

The problem will only grow worse as consumer-directed programs gain in popularity, the authors warn, unless systems are put in place to ensure that injured workers get the help they are entitled to. “Building on the recommendations we present to more effectively respond to occupational injury would be a feasible first step,” they write in “Barriers to Workers’ Compensation and Medical Care for Injured Personal Assistance Service Workers.”

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“The client looks forward to this. This makes their life a little more easy. Not easy just physically, but mentally and spiritually also,” says Chicago home care worker Muriel Jones in an online slide show of a typical day in her work life. “You being there kind of uplifts them, because they know somebody is coming every day or every other day, paying them attention.”

The beautiful pictures of Jones at work, which were taken by photojournalist Earl Dotter, are accompanied by a voiceover in which she talks about what she does and what it means to her clients.

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