Family Urges Others to Make Surprise Visits to Nursing Homes After Mom Is Found Alone ‘Gasping for Breath’
Nursing care is care that is provided and supervised by a registered qualified nurse. Technically it is provided by most domiciliary and residential caregivers and involves clinical care that can help people with difficult conditions.
Nursing care is usually provided in hospitals and hospices, but it can be also offered in the home or in a nursing home. Nurses are able to deal with:
- Monitor ventilation
- Tracheostomies
- Stomas
- Complex continence issues
- PEG feeding or tube feeding
- Catheters
However, in some nursing homes, the responsible people don’t follow the necessary procedures. In one nursing home in Ohio after the case when an 80-year-old patient Esther Brown was found collapsed over on an office desk, was raised a huge concern. Her son James Brown found her “gasping for breath” and being choked by her own saliva when he made an unexpected visit to the facility.
His pastor, Julia Wiggins, in order to urge families to make surprise visits to nursing facilities to check on their loved ones, shared two jarring photos of the elderly woman.
She explains the situation how they found Mother Esther Brown face down into a soft pillow gasping for breath and strangling on her own saliva in the corner of the nurses’ station. Attempting to find somebody to help they were knocking on doors for about 5 to 10 minutes before someone came to assist.
Wiggins added that James was heartbreaking and began to cry out. After hearing her son’s voice his mother tried with all her might to raise her head!
Expressing her frustration, Wiggins encouraged families that have somebody in the care centers and nursing homes to “make random visits” and told ABC 5 Cleveland that it is so far from the humanity, and that she thought it was a cat that they had brought in.
The Wiggins’ heartbreaking photos were shared over 20,000 times over the weekend and sparked an investigation with the Ohio Department of Aging and the Ohio Department of Health.
After the complaint filed by the family against Altercare Nobles Pond, the facility made a statement in which they explain what was done. They have followed the protocol established regarding any allegation, including immediately reporting the concern to the Ohio Department of Health and completing an internal investigation.
Esther’s family believes that she was mistreated in the facility and the health department and the care center are both looking into the allegations.
Watch the statements of the family members of the elderly woman:
