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William grew up in a dysfunctional family, as many of us do. He had a strained relationship with his mother, largely because of a 13-year-long, scorched-earth divorce war that she waged against his father, who was a steelworker. William’s parents were children of the Great Depression, his father was a member of the Greatest Generation, and William is a Baby Boomer.
As Mary Regina grew older, she lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and William lived 1,775 miles away in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
When William’s sister died young, he became his mother’s sole surviving offspring. And after Mary Regina broke her hip, William traveled to Pittsburgh and spent about 3 weeks observing what happened on the day shifts at the nursing home and listening as Mary Regina told him what happened at night.
William believed the state department of health (DOH) did not investigate satisfactorily his well-documented complaints about Mary Regina’s nursing home. As a former auditor, he believed that the methodology that the DOH used to investigate complaints about nursing homes was doomed to fail. The year-to-year statistics on DOH oversight performance verified this, in William’s opinion.
After resolving his lawsuit, William realized that he was just one of hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. who had filed complaints about nursing homes. He decided to broaden out his research from his own case study of his mother’s experience. He looked into how the state and federal oversight systems worked for others, and he found that what had happened in his mother’s case was not at all uncommon.
William was unprepared and utterly incompetent to deal with the problems his mother encountered after she broke her hip, yet he faced extreme deadline pressure as he struggled to make decisions. If a nursing home looms in the future for you or a loved one, you can become a smarter consumer by reading this book. In addition to detailing William’s experiences, the book includes a chapter on an advocacy organization that will assist current and prospective nursing home residents and their families in finding help: The National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care.