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As days go by, the immune system of your elderly loved one keeps on deteriorating, making them susceptible to acute and chronic illnesses. This necessitates monitoring vital signs to diagnose and treat underlying health problems before they advance. Do nursing homes monitor vital signs well enough to guarantee your parent’s safety?
Nursing homes take vital signs every day for the first week of admission and shift to once a month if the resident’s health is stable. For residents under medication, the nurses take vital signs once a shift. But if the condition is critical, nursing homes take vital signs as the situation demands.
The rest of this article explains how nursing homes schedule vital signs, their effectiveness, and factors that determine if a nursing home is efficient in taking vital signs.
How Nursing Homes Schedule Vital Signs
The aim of taking your elderly parent(s) to a nursing home is to give them quality care to prevent health complications and premature death. Most nursing facilities recognize their role and require nurses to detect and report changes in the health conditions of residents to optimize their safety. However, taking vital signs in a nursing home is not as vigorous as in a hospital.
The frequency of taking a resident’s vital signs largely depends on their health condition. During admission, the resident undergoes screening to evaluate their health status and to determine if the facility has the necessary resources to meet their needs.
Once admitted, the nurses monitor vital signs daily for one week, including temperature, heartbeat, breathing rate, and blood pressure.
If the vital signs are normal, the nurses shift monitoring to once per month. For patients under medication, monitoring takes a different route as follows:
- Residents under chronic illness treatment such as diabetes- once per week.
- Residents using drugs such as antibiotics or digoxin- once per shift.
- Residents with acute illnesses or injuries from falling- as the situation demands.
Are Nursing Homes Effective in Taking Vital Signs?
Over the past two decades, nursing facilities have been improving their service quality. Though there has been noticeable progress, there are still a multitude of challenges lingering around.
When you take your loved one to a nursing facility, there’s no guarantee they’ll receive round-the-clock care.
First, most nursing facilities have many residents and fewer workers. Only residents in critical conditions receive daily monitoring. The long interval between monitoring vital signs for patients with stable health conditions can lead to neglect and predispose the resident to health risks.
Also, nurses working with understaffed facilities work long hours and are prone to exhaustion and burnout. This leads to mistakes and missing out on residents’ health changes.
According to a survey, 46% of nurses confessed to having missed a patient’s health condition due to excess workload. Poor wages for a high-demanding role like this is the leading cause of insufficient nurses in nursing homes.
Other facilities face mismanagement issues, making it hard to buy enough equipment to take vital signs. Recognizing adverse changes in health conditions when it’s too late can lead to high hospital bills and an untimely death, which could have been preventable.
What Determines if a Nursing Home Is Efficient in Taking Vital Signs
Although there are uncountable nursing homes, they all differ in service delivery. To determine whether a nursing home is capable of monitoring the vital signs of your loved one, you should consider:
Staffing
Most residents in a nursing home require regular check-ups, which is impossible when there are inadequate nurses. When selecting a nursing home, you should ensure a ratio of about five residents to one nurse.
Such a ratio is favorable and allows the nurses to meet every resident’s health and emotional needs without exhaustion. It also reduces the likelihood of making errors when taking vital signs and makes it possible to follow up on the health changes of each resident.
Adequate Medical Equipment
The number of residents admitted to a facility should be proportional to the equipment available. Having more residents than a facility can accommodate causes delays in the delivery of services, risking the well-being of residents with complications.
An efficient nursing home should have enough tools like:
- Thermometers for monitoring body temperature.
- Stethoscopes for monitoring the heart and the lungs
- Sphygmomanometers for measuring blood pressure.
- Pulse oximetry to test oxygen saturation in the blood.
Resident Care Plan
Every resident’s condition is unique, and the care plan used in a nursing home should be flexible enough to accommodate everyone. If your loved one has a health complication, you should consider a facility that tests vital signs after short intervals. You should also ensure the facility has a quick response time to deliver medical attention in an emergency.
Nursing Home vs. Home Care
Instead of taking your loved one to a nursing home, you can opt to keep them at home and hire a licensed caregiver to monitor their vital signs as you wish.
Compared to a nursing home, home care has the following benefits:
- Personalized care: Home care offers one-to-one care, which helps the caregiver closely monitor the vital signs of the elderly daily. Unlike in nursing homes, this creates a personal bond where the elderly can communicate health discomfort to the nurse for further monitoring. Also, the nurse is attending to only one person, reducing errors and making the services more efficient.
- Customized care option: In-home care gives you the flexibility of making a schedule that meets the health needs of your loved one. You can hire a caregiver part-time or full-time, depending on the health status of your elderly parent. The familiar surroundings also help stabilize the vital organ functioning because there’s less disruption and distress compared to a nursing home.
- Affordability: A nursing home charges for all facilities provided, even if your loved one does not need them. With in-home care, you only buy vital signs monitoring equipment, as discussed above, and those that meet the health needs of your loved one.
Home care has many benefits compared to a nursing home, but the quality of service your elderly receives depends on the caregiver’s expertise. You should ensure the caregiver you chose is licensed to offer the services. Also, the elderly might need someone close by if the nurse is unavailable 24/7 in case of an emergency.
I’ve also written a guide comparing home care and caregivers. Knowing the differences will help you make an informed decision. Home Care Vs Caregivers: The Differences Explained
Final Thoughts
Monitoring the vital signs of the elderly is crucial in detecting underlying illnesses and taking the necessary steps toward recovery. If you take your loved one to a nursing home, they’ll receive a vital signs assessment once a month if they are in stable health conditions and weekly or daily as the situation demands if under medication. You can opt for home care which is more flexible if the arrangement fails to meet your needs.
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