By Healthcare Facilities Today

After several items disappeared in her mother's room in an Oklahoma City long-term care facility, a woman placed a motion-activated hidden camera on her mother's night table. She eventually saw footage of an aide stuffing latex gloves into her mother's mouth while another taunted her, tapping her on the head, laughing. Hoisting her from her wheelchair, they flung her on a bed. One performed a few heavy-handed chest compressions, according to an article in The New York Times. 

Propelled by the outcry over the case, Oklahoma became the third state — along with New Mexico and Texas — to explicitly permit residents in long-term care facilities to maintain surveillance cameras in their rooms. In the last two years, at least five states have considered similar legislation, the article said.

Although some states have administrative guidelines for electronic monitoring, most legislative efforts have stalled because of questions about liability and, in particular, privacy rights, raised by facility owners, unions, elder care lawyers and families.

Despite such concerns, not only have family members turned to these cameras, but even the government has used them, according to the article. A year ago, the New York state attorney general’s office, which has relied on hidden cameras in patient abuse and neglect cases for years, demonstrated its methods at a national training program for state investigators.

In June, Mike DeWine, the Ohio state attorney general, announced that his office, with permission from families, had placed cameras in residents’ rooms in an unspecified number of state facilities.  DeWine has moved to shut down at least one facility, in Zanesville, where, he said, cameras caught actions like an aide’s repeatedly leaving a stroke patient’s food by his incapacitated side.

Read the article.