What housing options are available?
What a nightmare!! What’s worse is that it’s hard to say whether the nursing home staff has tried everything possible to get a handle on things or whether they’ve become accustomed to calling you as the first action step whenever something happens. The latter is a distinct possibility in this case.
To begin to bring some order to this situation I would suggest the following:
A) Schedule a family meeting with the physician at the nursing home.
B) In that meeting make it crystal clear that you and your family cannot continue to be on-call two hours per day and that you do not have the money to pay for one on one care.
C) Ask for a written list of the medications that have been tried and the dosages. (This is important because not everyone responds to a particular medication in the same way. When difficult symptoms are present, experimentation with various combinations of medications and dosages is often needed to find what works.)
D) Ask for an accounting of the efforts made by the physician to experiment with various titrations of medications.
E) Get in touch with the primary care physician who was following your mother prior to the stroke and request that he or she consult with the nursing home physician regarding the medication.
If nothing else, this meeting will convey to the nursing home staff that the responsibility for “fixing” this situation does not rest with you and or your family. It sounds like they are trying hard to convince you that it does, but this isn’t true. At the end of the day, they are the medical professionals and they are being paid for her care.
A few last thoughts would be:
1) To contact the local Ombudsman office in your area, perhaps even prior to the meeting. The Ombusdman is charged with overseeing the conduct within nursing homes and to assist the family in advocating for the needs of the patients when necessary. It couldn’t hurt to consult with a representative about what you have been experiencing. Here is a link to a searchable database by state: http://www.ltcombudsman.org/about-ombudsmen.
2) Begin researching other nursing homes for a possible transfer. It's horrible to say, but nursing homes sometimes have beds available at a moment's notice for a reason. Just like finding the right medications to calm a distressed patient can take time to find, so too can the right nursing home.
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