Overmedication in the Nursing Home
By Paula Span
The New Old Age Blog
The New York Times
January 11, 2010
Within three months of admission, a team of University of South Florida researchers determined, 71 percent of Medicaid residents in Florida nursing homes were receiving a psychoactive medication — an antidepressant or anti-psychotic, say, or dementia drugs — even though most were not taking such drugs in the months before they moved in and didn’t have psychiatric diagnoses. Fifteen percent of residents were taking four or more such medications. But only 12 percent were getting nondrug treatments like behavioral therapy.
Unlike me, Victor Molinari, a professor of aging at the University of South Florida and lead author of the study, wasn’t startled by those statistics. “They confirmed what I suspected,” he told me in an interview. “And people who work in nursing homes wouldn’t be surprised.”
To have a great majority of residents on these powerful drugs isn’t, on the face of it, an indictment of the way they’re cared for. Mental health problems are rampant in nursing homes and a primary reason elderly people move in; some observers have taken to comparing nursing homes to psych wards. So some proportion of residents should be receiving treatment, possibly including medication, for anxiety, depression, bipolar disease, schizophrenia or the behavior problems that stem from dementia.
But 71 percent?
SOURCE: Global Aging.Org
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This is the situation in many countries. Not many politicians or Researchers are game enough to reveal the reality in their own country.
It is really up to Elder Advocates, and concerned family members to highlight such situation and call for new measures to ensure that this horrible situation is corrected.
................. AC
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