Nursing homes where people with dementia live their final days may refuse to honor the patients’ wishes to withhold food if is required by law to offer regular daily meals, with feeding assistance–or force-feeding–if necessary.
elderly
Lethal Crisis: When Seniors Turn To Suicide
As suicide rates continue to climb, claiming more than 47,000 lives in 2017, a six-month investigation finds that older Americans are quietly killing themselves in nursing homes, assisted living centers and adult care homes.
Avoidable Sepsis Infections Send Thousands Of Nursing Home Seniors To Gruesome Deaths
No one tracks sepsis cases closely enough to know how often these severe infections turn fatal. But the toll — both human and financial — is enormous, an investigation finds.
Unlocked And Loaded: Families Confront Dementia And Guns
The epidemic of gun violence that kills 96 people a day is focused on mental illness. But a little-known problem is what to do about firearms in homes of aging Americans with dementia.
‘Aggressive’ New Advance Directive Would Let Dementia Patients Refuse Food
Do not resuscitate (DNR) orders are common. Do not feed orders, not so much, but New York may be opening the way to giving patients with dementia that option.
Nursing Home Industry Successfully Quashes Residents’ Bill of Rights
Florida Constitution Revision Commission member Brecht Heuchan withdrew a proposal that would have guaranteed rights to nursing-home residents and allowed them to sue facilities if those rights were violated.
At Palm Coast Meeting On Elder Needs, Pleas For Senior Center, Better Information and Respect
Some 90 people turned out to speak their mind on what’s needed in Palm Coast for seniors, revealing long lists of needs but also gaps of awareness of what’s already here.
Should Older Drivers Face Special Restrictions?
Legislatures have become increasingly reluctant to restrict driver’s licenses for seniors or impose extra requirements — such as vision or road tests — for getting them renewed based solely on their advancing age.
Along Palm Coast Parkway, Yet Another Tattoo Parlor, and Yet Another Assisted Living Facility
The two businesses may add upwards of 50 jobs in the city’s core commercial center along Palm Coast Parkway—an assisted living facility for dementia patients, and at least the third tattoo studio along the Parkway approved in recent years.
America’s Other Doping Problem: Drugging Up the Elderly in Hospitals
An increasing number of elderly patients are on multiple medications, raising chances of dangerous drug interactions. Often the drugs are prescribed by different specialists who don’t communicate, and hospital doctors add to the list of drugs, sometimes unnecessarily or unsuitably.