Ever notice how life can be a bit unfair?
If you run a nursing home, you probably have. Because let’s face it, you have one mega-sized target on your back. One that people in most other fields never have to worry much about.
Take hospitals. Thousands die in them each day due to neglect or incompetence. Yet is anyone demanding Congressional hearings or additional oversight? Hardly. After all, hospitals are good neighbors, right? They are places that heal and save lives, right? Yep, except when they don’t. Which is all too often.
Then there are the drug makers. All they want to do is make the world a healthier place. At least, that’s their story. So what if they happen to spend more on marketing than product development. So what if they happen to make a few extra billion or two along the way. They care about you.
And what about our nation’s higher education ecosystem? Those citadels of higher learning are focused exclusively on spreading knowledge, right? So what if their charges have been shooting up two or three times the rate of inflation for the past decade or so? Those new campus buildings are not going to pay for themselves.
But as for nursing facilities? Here, no quarter is to be given. Hardly matters that they care for a million and a half people each year desperate for help. They are bad. Bad. Bad. Bad.
So what gives here?
Couple of things. For one, the first three players have done a pretty good job of selling their stories. Nursing homes, not as much.
But there’s more.
To be sure, there are tons of dedicated professionals working in long-term care. As it happens, there’s no shortage of werewolves, either. The problem here: There’s often no obvious way to tell them apart.
And to put this as delicately as possible, ferreting out rascals is not exactly baked into the field’s DNA. So what’s the fix, here? It’s not easy, for as was noted earlier, life is not always fair.
The best possible course would be for sketchy nursing home operators to stop doing those sketchy things that tarnish everyone else. For a number of reasons, including greed, that is not going to happen on its own.
So what’s left? Well, doing a better job of PR would help, to a point. Accentuating the positive might fuel some reputational improvement. But sometimes no amount of lipstick can create a beauty queen.
It would be nice if the industry could find a way to self-police its villains. But for a variety of reasons, history has taught us that is not going to happen either.
Which means that the job of cleaning up the inevitable various messes will fall on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, lawmakers and various media and outlets. Which, come to think of it, has been the case for decades now.
How’s that working out?
John O’Connor is editorial director for McKnight’s.
Opinions expressed in McKnight’s Long-Term Care News columns are not necessarily those of McKnight’s.
