Assisted living companies raise their standards

Assisted living companies will have to raise their standards starting in July after new rules to protect people with dementia cleared their last hurdle with unanimous approval from Arizona regulators. The Governor’s Regulatory Review Council, charged with vetting new state regulations, met June 3 to decide whether the Arizona Department of Health Services’ plan for enforcing the new law was fair.

Caitlin McGlade, A Data Reporter at The Arizona Republic, joins Arizona Horizon to discuss a newly published yearlong investigation in 2023 about assisted living residents hurting or even killing each other when caregivers didn’t know how to handle dementia symptoms, mixed up or forgot to give medication, and management ignored issues repeatedly.

“There was very little training when it came to actually working with people with dementia. Even though a lot of people who live in assisted living have dementia, the dementia-specific training is pretty minimal for caregivers. So what you wound up having is employees who don’t really know how to manage really difficult behaviors,” said McGlade when it comes to the experience of caregivers to patients with dementia.

“So that was a big problem that we found in our investigative series that ran in 2023, was that facilities would make all kind of egregious mistakes like mixing up somebody’s medicine then that person ended up killing their roommate. That particular incident that I just cited, the facility got fined $500,” said McGlade.