One of the most common themes in nursing home abuse and neglect cases, as we’ve discussed, is the tragedies that unfold — most of which are preventable — when nursing homes are understaffed and the staff is undertrained or provided with inadequate resources.

Most (if not all) of the time, these decisions as to how to allocate a nursing home’s resources are profit-driven decisions that come down from the owners, operators, and/or administrators and, in the end, the staff becomes overwhelmed and the patients ultimately suffer.

That’s what makes a story from downstate Illinois so interesting, where a union of nursing home employees and staff protested a Camp Point, Illinois facility for failing to provide adequate supplies and staffing levels — citing examples of torn bibs and shortages of towels and diapers.

This raises a question that many attorneys in this area of law face in cases against nursing homes — to what loyalty does a nursing home’s staff really owe a facility? Many of these workers are underpaid, asked to perform the work of two or three workers — some of which far exceeds their experience and training, and, at the end of the day, they are the ones that almost always lose their jobs when something happens to a resident and the facility gets sued, all in the name of profit for the owners and operators of these facilities.

With the Illinois General Assembly recently setting required skilled staffing levels far shorter than many had hoped, it will be interesting to see if protests such as this catch on.

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