Man murdered in nursing home

An autopsy has shown that a Cook County nursing home resident suffered injuries in an assault which resulted in his death.  The man was a resident of the Burnham Terrace nursing home.  The nursing home is a facility which cares for many mentally ill residents. 

The mentally ill are certainly entitled to reasonable care.  However, there are special challenges with serving a patient population which includes many mentally ill residents.  One of those is that they tend to be younger and live alongside many older resident who have physical disabilities.  Loss of control by a younger resident, with violence directed at an older, disabled nursing home resident, is likely to result in serious injury.  This is the formula we have seen at play in many of the resident-on-resident nursing home assault cases we have seen.

The key to handling mentally ill residents is to have adequate staffing to handle the patient mix.  Unfortunately, many nursing homes that serve large numbers of mentally ill patients derive large portions of their revenue from Public Aid, so there is fairly minimal staffing.  This places residents at risk of harm.