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Kentucky State LTC Ombudsman, Sherry Culp, Quoted in Article about Staffing

October 04, 2018

Kentucky State Long-Term Care Ombudsman, Sherry Culp, is quoted in the Lexington Herald. Sherry discusses several issues including nursing home staffing. “It’s the staffing,” said Sherry Culp, executive director of the Nursing Home Ombudsman Agency of the Bluegrass in Lexington. Culp’s nonprofit agency visits nursing homes in Central Kentucky to monitor living conditions and inform residents of their legal rights.

“A lot of the problems we work on, it all comes down to the fact that either there isn’t sufficient staff on hand to care for people or else they’re not being adequately trained, or both. Over and over and over we see this,” Culp said. “If you’ve got one nurse’s aide and 40 residents, there’s no ability to do any basic care, much less to develop any sort of a relationship with people.”

Hardly anyone opens doors at the Capitol for nursing home residents, said Culp, of the ombudsman agency.

“We’ve got 34,000 people in long-term care facilities in Kentucky, but they’re not going to be in Frankfort lobbying,” Culp said. “Something like 50 percent of them have memory loss, and of that 50 percent, 70 percent have behaviors that can be difficult to manage — you know, spitting, biting, wandering unsafely. These are not really people who are in a position to tell our elected leaders what they’re going through.”

Read the full article here.

This article is part of a series on understaffing in Kentucky. Read the other two articles He crashed to his death down the nursing home stairs. Nobody noticed for nine hours and He writes laws that help Kentucky’s low-rated nursing homes. He also works for them.