Jenny's Medical Thriller Blog

The Perfect Storm for Drama: Long Term Care

Understaffing is a crisis in healthcare in general, but even more so in nursing homes. Staffing is the major expense that is always under pressure. A perfect budget plan can implode easily with overtime, the need for agency staff to fill in staffing needs, sick calls, earned vacations, and unexpected injuries.

Depending on location, some provinces and states have minimum hours per day care per resident, which sound good on paper, but create chaos on the floors.

In my thriller "Terror at the Manor" medication errors play a crucial role in the plot. This is not fantasy but reality as staff are managing dozens of complex medication regimes, sometimes with residents with dementia who might refuse to take their pills, or hide them, and the potential for dangerous mistakes multiples exponentially.

Families can be quite a handful as well, verbally abusing staff who are doing their best under difficult circumstances. Nothing brings out family drama quite like end of life care, decisions and inheritance concerns. I've even seen staff physically attacked, followed to their cars, and yelled at by family members who sometimes have very unrealistic expectations of the level of care that can be provided.

Why these stories matter:

As a thriller writer, I am not trying to scare people away from nursing homes or demonize them. Instead, it's important that people understand the realities of rules, limitations, and the toll they take on the human caregiver. Human dramas both for the residents and the staff occur every day.

The residents in nursing homes are often society's most vulnerable people. They depend on others for their daily needs, their safety, and their dignity. The isolation, the power dynamics, and the life and death decisions are fertile ground for exploring the darker side of human nature.

Join my community: Authorjennywhite@gmail.com to keep up to date with my thrillers!