Misc. Ramblings

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February 28, 2003

Unclear on the Concept

Being old is bad enough, unfortunately, that's the not worst of it. In Hawai'i, over the last three years, 10 elderly people have died from neglect or abuse. In the last decade, 33 people 65 years or older died from pressure "bed" sores associated with neglect on the part of their caretakers.

So it is no wonder that there is a legislative bill to allow the Hawai'i Department of Health (DOH) to conduct unannounced inspections of adult residential care homes to detect this very type of neglect. Unannounced health inspections are already done for other types of businesses such as restaurants and bars, but not care homes.

But now comes the new Republican head of the DOH testifying that she supports unannounced inspections as long as the care home is given one week notice ahead of time. I don't know whether to be outraged at the stupidity of this statement or just sad that our elders are under the "care" of people like this.

Yes, I know, who would want to be a care home operator knowing that Big Government could come knocking at their door without your being able to clean things up a bit before they came. But that's the whole point folks. The unannounced inspection is there as an incentive to all operators to keep things clean and safe at all times. If they know ahead of time an inspection is coming, it is trivially easy to put up a façade of good care. But I guess this is too obvious.

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Comments

Posted by: sjon at March 3, 2003 01:27 AM