A widespread bias exists among legal, medical, and social service professionals that the appropriate placement for elderly individuals with cognitive impairment (dementia) is a nursing home. Two major reasons for institutionalization are to remove the patient from a potentially harmful situation and to relieve the family of the burden of care.…

Proposes the use of a post-substantiation model for responding to incidents of abuse within an institutional setting. Provides an example of how this model is applied to the investigation of institutional abuse. (Author/BB)

A more productive approach to providing appropriate long-term care is to separate physical from psychosocial needs when performing functional assessment and to rearrange them into a matrix. By examining each need separately, and where needs overlap in the matrix, more direct assessment can be performed, and specified interventions can be designed.…