Nursing home statutes: mistreatment definitions

Forty-nine states and the District of Columbia have adult protective services (APS) related statutes that define adult/elder mistreatment found in domestic settings. Institutional adult/elder mistreatment laws are administered by the nursing home licensing agencies and may contain different or duplicate APS-related mistreatment definitions. The purposes of this paper are to describe and summarize the mistreatment definitions in the nursing home licensure statutes and compare those definitions with the definitions found in the APS-related statutes.

Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis law database systems were used to retrieve all adult protective services statutes and institutional licensure statutes. Each statute's text was reviewed and coded by two researchers.

Institutional mistreatment definitions are addressed in 14 of the states and District of Columbia's nursing home statutes. No one state has a list of the 27 different definitions of mistreatment identified in the literature search. The common types of mistreatment described were physical and emotional abuse, neglect, financial and property exploitation, and sexual abuse.

Standardized definitions of resident-to-resident and institutional specific types of mistreatment need to be included in nursing home statutes.