Last month was our busiest month in terms of visitors to our site.  Thank you for taking the time to visit, ask a question or leave a comment.  Your suggestions allow us to continually improve our site and make the Nursing Homes Abuse Blog an important Internet destination.  Many suggestions have turned into great ideas blog posts.

As always, I make it a point to answer each question personally. 

Below are last month's five most popular entries:

Failure To Monitor Bowel Movements In Nursing Home Patients Can Lead To Impacted Bowels

In addition to monitoring food and liquid intake of nursing home patients, staff need to pay attention to the elimination of the wastes.   When urine and feces are not produced on a regular basis, nursing home staff must bring these problems to the attention of physicians.

Study Reveals Nursing Home Patients Chronic Pain Is Not Adequately Controlled

The results from a five-year study addressing the ability of care-givers and family to perceive pain in nursing home patients has revealed both parties fail to accurately assess chronic pain levels. In reaching this conclusion, researchers in the Netherlands studied 174 nursing home patients with and without cognitive impairments.  The study also concluded that family members were better at accurately assessing pain levels in their loved ones compared with nursing home staff.

Smoking-Related Fires Are A Real Threat To Nursing Home Patients. Is It Time To Put Out The Fire?

It only is a matter of time before another nursing home fire claims the life of another patient. While less publicized, hundreds of elderly people receive burns every year during their admission to skilled nursing facilities. Anyway you look at the situation, fires in nursing homes remain a real-- yet under-appreciated threat to nursing home patient safety.

Nursing Home Negligence Lawsuit Claims New York Facility Allowed Advanced Bed Sore To Develop In Rehab Patient

As nursing home lawyers, one of the situations we commonly encounter involve relatively healthy people who enter nursing homes for rehabilitation due to an orthopedic or cardiac conditions--- only to encounter more problems during their admission to a facility.  In some of these situations, nursing home staff wrongfully assume that many of the prevention programs used for more disabled patients are not necessary.

Illinois Nursing Home That Turned 'Blind Eye' To Sexual Assaults Now Faces Fines

The LaSalle County Nursing Home is a medium-sized 99 bed nursing home facility in Ottawa, Illinois.  On June 6, 2009, the Illinois Department of Public Health (“IDPH”) released a report following an investigation, revealing that a male resident at LaSalle County had molested ten female residents.