Resident to resident abuse

[tiredofthisRN]

I worked briefly in a facility where there was one particular resident who was beyond difficult. He was mid 30's and completely neurological intact unlike all the other residents....he was very abusive to everyone , staff and other residents.....anger issues.....it was a very scary place....staff suffer terrible abuse....they all needed their jobs .....I always wondered if these incidents of abuse between him and other residents were ever really reported....I just do not believe that administration reported these.....I feel like maybe they were trying to cover up those incidents because it might somehow reflect badly on them or it might be a liability issue..maybe they were trying to protect themselves from lawsuits from the other residents families....it was so frequent that I think they just did whatever they had to do to protect themselves. .....So my question is..they could face lawsuits bc of this resident behaviour correct ? I just felt like something shady was going on there. It seems to me that they would have gone bankrupt if they actually had to pay out for all those incidents. ..I was told that he could not be placed in any other facility because no facility would take him.....also is there a way that I can find out if those occurrences were ever reported. Left there long ago...It was the worst experience of my life....opinions ?

[caliotter3]

We had a difficult old guy who was also blind and a relative newcomer. He would walk around with no idea where he was. He thought all the female nurses were supposed to be his wife. One night he went into another resident's area and tried to get into the bed. The resident he bothered got mad at him. The next time he encroached on this guy's space, the annoyed resident went to the foyer and broke off a piece of a wooden trellis in one of the planters and came back and attacked the blind interloper. All of a sudden, like the next day, the blind wanderer found himself in the locked-down hall, where there were no residents likely to be bothered by his wandering. The stick attack incident made the local newspaper accounts when that facility was reported on in the big scandal of the day back then.

The administrator's way of dealing with the problem of this physical attack of one resident by another, was to move the attacked resident behind locked doors, away from the man who attacked him. An easy solution to that problem. The blind man went downhill fast and did not last long afterwards as I recall.