Sacramento, Calif., Advocate for Elderly Targets Nursing Homes
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It has been two decades since Carole Herman turned her rage about the death of her beloved Aunt Millie into a crusade. Twenty years, and Herman is still seething. “Our elderly people are abused and neglected in nursing homes every single day,” Herman says, her eyes narrowing, her manicured fingers flailing, her words spewing out like venom. Homes are dangerously understaffed, she continues. The industry is in cahoots with regulators. Reform has not happened fast enough. “Things never change,” Herman laments, shaking her head. “I want to quit every week.” Many in the industry, and those charged with monitoring it, no doubt wish she would. Even some of Herman’s supporters admit that her public pronouncements that nursing homes routinely “kill” people and “steal” from them, her relentless stream of formal complaints on behalf of residents and their families, and her occasionally confrontational meetings with administrators and regulators can be over the top. Some of her detractors call her egotistical and overzealous. “I would describe her as a flamethrower,” says Mark Reagan, a San Francisco lawyer who defends nursing homes and their corporate owners. “It’s almost impossible to work with her toward collaborative solutions. I don’t see her as a particularly positive force in advocating for the elderly.” But since setting aside her work as a computer software executive to start the nonprofit Foundation Aiding the Elderly in 1983, Herman’s commitment to her cause has only deepened. “I have made plenty of enemies, and they will do just about anything to shut me up,”… Source : accessmylibrary.com |