She shattered her leg in a car crash. Doctors drilled a metal device into her bones to reconnect them. And then the nursing home left her lying there — call light on, crying in pain — for two and a half goddamn hours because there weren’t enough hands on the floor.
Lynette Couture is 55 years old. She asked for pain medication three times. She called the nursing station from her own cell phone. Nobody answered. She kept a journal because somebody had to keep track, and it sure as hell wasn’t the facility. A non-medical staffer working a double shift finally found a nurse at 12:15 in the morning.
Half of Massachusetts nursing homes are understaffed. Not a few. Half.
You know what that is? That’s a business model. Somebody looked at the staffing numbers and decided the savings were worth more than the person in the bed. They bill families. They bill Medicare. They bill Medicaid. And then they don’t hire enough aides to answer a goddamn call light.
‘The angrier I got, the more I cried,’ Couture said. That’s not a patient complaint. That’s a woman learning at midnight that nobody is coming.
They don’t call it neglect. They call it ‘understaffing.’ Like the schedule just accidentally came up short. Like nobody decided to run the floor on a skeleton crew while the corporate balance sheet looks fine. Somebody made that decision. Somebody profited. And Lynette Couture lay in the dark with metal in her bones, pressing a button nobody answered.
Family values, my ass. You want to call it care, staff the goddamn hallway.
Source story: Half of Massachusetts nursing homes are understaffed.